mardi, 22 mai 2018

The follow is the text of the talk that Counter-Currents editor John Morgan delivered to The New York Forum on May 20, 2017.

Tonight I thought I’d talk about Julius Evola, since yesterday (May 19) was his 119th birthday, and I have overseen the publication of many of Evola’s texts in English. Evola’s the sort of figure who people seem to either love or hate, although he’s someone more often referenced than actually read on the Right, which is unfortunate. And really, in order to appreciate Evola, you need to be willing to step back from the everyday world and look at just about everything from the exact opposite perspective that we’re conditioned to look at them these days, and that’s not easy for most people. So in that sense, Evola most definitely isn’t a thinker for everyone. And to be fair, he made it clear in his work that he wasn’t interested in addressing himself to the masses. He wanted to speak to the spiritual elite which he believed was the real driving force behind culture and history. So from a modern perspective, the sort of ideas that Evola propagated are about as far removed from our present-day reality as possible, and yet I think he remains relevant to us, as I’ll get into later. Certainly, the mainstream media thinks Evola is relevant. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the article[2]The New York Times ran in February, which tried to suggest that Steve Bannon is supposedly some sort of disciple of Evola, and which resulted in my inbox becoming clogged with messages from people sending me the link and asking, “Did you see this?”

I have to address this briefly, as it became the source of a lot of annoying rumors. As much as I would like to believe that the White House Chief of Staff is an Evolian, an objective look at the facts quickly dispels this idea. It’s true that Bannon mentioned Evola once in passing in a talk he gave to the Vatican[3] in 2014 where he was speaking about “the global tea party movement,” but to read any significance into it is really making a mountain out of a molehill. Here is everything Bannon has ever said about Evola publicly:

When Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an advisor [Alexander Dugin] who hearkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early twentieth century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism. A lot of people that are traditionalists are attracted to that.

All this proves is that Bannon has heard of Evola. It no more indicates that Bannon is a traditionalist than Obama referencing Mao in passing means that he is a Maoist. And it isn’t even an accurate statement, since it certainly can’t be said that traditionalism led to Fascism, as it didn’t even exist prior to the advent of Fascism in Italy in 1922, so clearly Bannon doesn’t even have a good understanding of it, nor is he speaking of it favorably.

Bannon went on to say:

One of the reasons is that they [the traditionalists] believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism – and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. . . I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes – particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism – and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing.

What he said is a bit confusing, since he’s equating Evola and traditionalism with Fascism, and then in turn with Putin, which is pretty ridiculous in itself, but it seems that what he means by “tradition” is “family values” and conservative canards of that sort which wax lyrical about the wonders of the 1950s or the nineteenth century (or I guess these days even the 1980s, which, as an American in his 40s who lived through Reagan’s America, is still baffling to me). What Evola meant by capital-T Tradition was something very different from the lower case-t traditions so beloved by conservatives, but I’ll get into that later.

So really, given that this is the sole reference to Evola that Bannon has ever made, while he is most likely the first major American political figure who has even heard of Evola, it’s nevertheless pretty clear that Evola doesn’t have any real significance for him, and still less for Trump. All it really demonstrates are the failing standards of journalism in America and the increasing stupidity of the Left. It’s just yet another attempt by them to try to link Trump’s administration to fascism. On the plus side, it did have the interesting effect of sending Evola’s main work, Revolt Against the Modern World[4], to the number one spot[5] in Amazon’s “New Age” category for a couple of months. Although I don’t want to sound as if I’m belittling Bannon, since he does have some fascinating interests, including one report I read which claimed that Bannon has studied the Hindu Bhagavad Gita[6] and cited it on occasion – something which Evola would certainly have approved of.

But before I get into what Evola has to tell us today, I want to tell a bit about his background. Evola never wrote much about himself, but he did pass on a few things, and scholars have pieced together some of the rest. He was born in 1898 as Giulio Evola in Rome, where he was to live for his entire life, but as an adult he assumed the ancient Roman form of his name, Julius. He’s often referred to as “Baron” Evola, although as far as has been determined, he held no actual title and never used one himself, and thus it seems to be an honorific bestowed by his admirers in reference to his aristocratic origins – Evola’s family originally came from the Sicilian nobility.

He studied engineering at university, although he refused to take a degree since he considered doing so too bourgeois – which is the exact opposite of the attitude of most American university students today, where they’d be happy to forego all the studying and just get the degree. By then, the First World War had broken out, and Evola served as an artillery officer in the Italian army. He didn’t stick with engineering, however, and after the war he soon became the leading exponent of the Dadaist avant-garde art movement in Italy. In fact, I don’t know if this is still the case, but I have heard that at least at one time, one of Evola’s paintings[7] used to be on display in the entrance hall of the Modern Art Museum in Rome.

Not much is known about Evola during this period, but he sometimes hinted at having led a rather bohemian existence. He did write about taking psychedelic drugs at this time, which was one of the experiences which led him to take an interest in mysticism. We also know that he was friends with the Russian Satanist and occultist Maria de Naglowska, who wrote a series of books on sex magick, some of which Evola wrote introductions for – so read what you want into that. Evola was also an avid mountain climber.

The 1920s saw Evola pass through several phases which ended with him coming around to the traditionalist perspective that would remain more or less the same for the rest of his life. He found the nihilism inherent in avant-garde circles untenable, and soon became interested in the Idealist philosophical tradition. It was here that he first encountered the idea that the world which we experience through our senses isn’t the “real” world, something which is also a fundamental teaching of many of the ancient religious and mystical traditions. He also developed the idea of what he termed the “Absolute Individual,” and he called the system of thought surrounding it “Magical Idealism.” Already drawing on Asian sacred doctrines, Evola identified the Absolute Individual with certain Taoist notions, in that the Absolute Individual is a type of man who frees himself from the limitations of the individual ego and attains a transcendent, impersonal perspective akin to what is usually attributed to the gods. He wrote several large books on this theme, which were his first publications.

Evola ultimately found Western philosophy too narrow, however, and before long he became much more interested in occult and religious doctrines, especially, but not only, those of the East. In 1927, Evola was one of the founding members of the UR Group, which many scholars and practitioners have agreed was one of the most serious attempts to study and practice occult techniques anywhere in modern times. Evola’s involvement was short-lived, however, and he left the group the following year.

The 1920s were also, of course, the time when Mussolini and the Fascists took power in Italy. Evola greeted the rise of the Fascists favorably. Early on, the Italian Fascists were strongly Nietzschean and hostile to Christianity, as was Evola himself, as he considered Christianity to be a foreign, weak, Judaic element that had imposed itself on essentially pagan and imperial Europe, and he believed that the egalitarianism and universalism of Christianity’s teachings opened the door for liberalism and Communism. This argument is not unique to Evola, and I’m sure many of you have heard it reiterated elsewhere.

By the late 1920s, however, Mussolini recognized that he needed to reconcile with the Catholic Church if he was going to retain power. Alarmed by this development, Evola published perhaps his most controversial book, Pagan Imperialism, where he called for Fascist Italy to reject Christianity and return to its roots in the ancient traditions of the Roman Empire. The book didn’t have the desired effect, however, as Mussolini signed a pact with the Vatican in 1929, which among other things established it as an independent state. In addition to the book being blacklisted by the Vatican, Evola also earned himself a lot of enemies, including many prominent people within the Fascist Party itself, and for years he only went out in public accompanied by bodyguards. Evola regretted this book in later years, not because of the backlash against it but because he felt that the ideas he had expressed in it weren’t yet mature enough. While Evola always considered Christianity to be something inappropriate for Europeans, his stance on it softened, and in later years it’s clear from his writings that while it wasn’t his ideal, he recognized that a Christian Europe was far preferable to a secular or a Communist one.

By the end of the 1920s, Evola had also discovered the thinker who was to have a more decisive influence on his life than any other: René Guénon. Guénon was a French metaphysician who was, from the standpoint of religious studies, very possibly the most important thinker of the twentieth century. He wrote dozens of books describing the worldview that he saw as being common to all the world’s religious and esoteric traditions, and cataloguing and explaining their sacred symbols.

Guénon decried all forms of progressivism, and upheld the teachings found in many of the world’s religious traditions which teach that, contrary to the modern view, civilizations begin in a state of perfection and then gradually decay into degeneracy, and that the forms of technical and scientific progress that modern man is so proud of are in fact mere illusions, and that while he gains greater power over the material world, man is in fact becoming weaker and sicker in a physical and spiritual sense.

Another of Guénon’s crucial insights was the idea of Tradition. This idea of Tradition holds that at the core of all the world’s religious and mystical traditions, there is a single metaphysical reality which reveals itself to men at certain crucial points in time, and that it assumes different outward forms depending on the place and time that it manifests itself and solidifies as religion. This may sound suspiciously New-Agey, but Guénon was quite strict on the fact that he did not believe that one could combine several different traditions into one, but had to accept each on its own terms as a metaphysical whole, and also he believed that esoteric knowledge could only be conveyed by properly initiated authorities, and as a result he rejected all of what we would call “New Age” thought as subversive and counter-traditional.

As I mentioned before, it’s important to distinguish between Tradition and tradition in the usual sense. A tradition, as in for example giving gifts to loved ones at Christmas, might be a positive form of cultural continuity, and it might even be connected to the metaphysical in some way (in this case, to the celebration of a holy day), but these lesser traditions form the outermost layer of tradition, and can change with time, whereas the core of Tradition is eternal and unchanging throughout time.

The last important element of Guénon’s worldview that is important to mention is the cycle of ages. All the ancient civilizations, including both the Nordic and Greco-Roman traditions, had a sense of time as occurring in a sequence that begins with a Golden Age, and then passes through a series of gradually declining ages until it reaches a final age of darkness after which everything is destroyed, and then the entire cycle repeats itself. Guénon and Evola, consistently with most other modern spiritual figures, identified the age we are living in now as the final age, or Kali Yuga, as it is called in both Hinduism and Buddhism. In the ancient Scandinavian religion, the equivalent age was the Wolf Age. Lest this seems like just some metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, let me quote a few examples from the Hindu scriptures that describe the characteristics of Kali Yuga:

In Kali Yuga, wealth alone will be considered the sign of a man’s good birth, proper behavior, and fine qualities. And law and justice will be applied only on the basis of one’s power.

Men and women will live together merely because of superficial attraction, and success in business will depend on deceit. Womanliness and manliness will be judged according to one’s expertise in sex.

A person’s propriety will be seriously questioned if he does not earn a good living. And one who is very clever at juggling words will be considered a learned scholar.

He who can maintain a family will be regarded as an expert man, and the principles of religion will be observed only for the sake of reputation.

Cities will be dominated by thieves, the Vedas will be contaminated by speculative interpretations of atheists, political leaders will virtually consume the citizens, and the so-called priests and intellectuals will be devotees of their bellies and genitals.

When irreligion becomes prominent in the family, the women of the family become corrupt, and from the degradation of womanhood comes unwanted population.

These are just a few of many such examples. Whatever one thinks of Hinduism as a religion, this description certainly seems uncannily accurate in our present world.

To get back to Evola, he quickly came to see Guénon as the definitive scholar of esotericism, and many of Guénon’s basic ideas were to form the basis of Evola’s work for the rest of his life. He was no uncritical disciple, however, and there were significant differences in their respective approaches to Tradition. Evola, for instance, identified the Primordial Tradition from which all the other religions later emerged as being the same thing as the Hyperborean, Aryan, masculine, and solar tradition, and saw later religions, especially the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as lunar, feminine, degenerated forms of it. He still believed that they were legitimate vehicles for esoteric knowledge, but that they were lesser forms of religion than, for example, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, or the pre-Christian religions of Europe. By the same token, Evola was not a neo-pagan. While he respected the pagan European religions and frequently referenced them in his work, he thought their time had passed and that there was no meaningful way to resurrect them in the modern world – in fact, he thought that people who try to bring them back were actually counter-traditional.

But while Evola saw religion as the key to overcoming the problems of the modern world, he didn’t understand it in the sense of going to church on Sundays or following the Ten Commandments. He thought that those outer forms of religion were necessary for the normies, but Evola’s interest was always in the spiritual elite, and the aspects of religion that most interested him were those that could be used to overcome the self and to increase one’s power to a godlike state – essentially the same as the goal of the Absolute Individual that he had written about earlier, but relying on the practices of the mystics and ascetics of the ancient religions. And while the idea of aiming at becoming a god may sound crazy to modern ears, I should point out that many of the pre-Christian religious texts maintain that such a thing is indeed possible for a very few superior, self-realized individuals.

I’ve scarcely done justice to Evola’s esoteric thought, but it’s so massive and complex that there’s no way I can give a comprehensive overview of it in the time I have tonight. Those who are interested in learning more about it should consult Evola’s books on the subject – most of the major ones have already been translated – and especially his main work, Revolt Against the Modern World, where he really outlines his entire worldview. The Path of Cinnabar[8], his autobiography, also gives a good overview of his ideas.

Introducing Evola’s concept of Tradition, however, is necessary for understanding his relationship with politics, which is what I want to talk about now. As I said, Evola was on the outs with the Fascists after he published Pagan Imperialism. But Evola saw Fascism – not just Italian Fascism, but all the fascist movements of Europe – not as something Traditional in the true sense, since fascism by its very nature was something very modern and revolutionary, but at least as something which preserved certain elements of the traditional world, and which could possibly serve as a bridge toward an eventual restoration of Tradition. For Evola, Tradition could only be maintained in a civilization which had a legitimate hierarchy, in which the priesthood and the warrior class stood in a privileged position over the lower classes. To a Traditionalist, the only legitimate form of government can be a monarch and a nobility ruling in tandem with a priesthood, since, as all sacred traditions have held, the King acts as the bridge between the spiritual and the material worlds. This is necessary so that these upper castes can act as the guardians of Tradition and make sure that the society as a whole continues to be guided by it.

In a time when Europe was torn between Communism on one side and liberal democracy on the other, it was clear to Evola that fascism was by far the best alternative. To Evola, Communism and democracy, especially as represented by the United States, were just two sides of the same coin, since both civilizations have equality as their goal and both allow no place for the sacred to enter into politics. He also saw Fascism as flawed, especially in its socialist aspects – Evola had no tolerance for any form of socialism, whether nationalist or internationalist – but he nevertheless believed that it had the potential to become something better, especially if it were to become guided by Traditional principles.

Evola had no illusions that he could convert the entire Fascist movement into a Traditionalist one, but he did hope that he might be able to help to forge a Traditionalist elite within the Party by influencing some of its intellectuals and leaders. And indeed, Evola did succeed in winning friends among the Fascist elite who were receptive to his message, and in the 1930s Evola was able to begin publishing articles in some of the official Fascist newspapers and journals. He never joined the Fascist Party, however, and in fact referred to his standpoint as “supra-fascist”: transcending what Fascism was already offering. A quote which seems to encapsulate Evola’s attitude toward Fascism is, “To the extent that Fascism follows and defends our principles, so far can we consider ourselves Fascists. So far and no further.” (A quote which I’ve paraphrased to describe my own attitude toward both Trump and the Alt Right.)

Evola didn’t limit himself to Italy, and he forged contacts with fascist and nationalist movements all over Europe during the 1930s. He held Romania’s Iron Guard and its leader, Corneliu Codreanu, in particularly high esteem, respecting them for combining Romanian Orthodox mysticism and rites with their political activities. He also had many contacts among the radical Right in Germany, although during the 1930s the National Socialists kept their distance from him, as they were suspicious of his aristocratic ties (the Nazis saw the old German aristocracy and the Kaiser as an obstacle to their own revolutionary aims). And in fact, Evola didn’t think very highly of the Nazis, either. If you read what he wrote about them, especially in his post-war book, Notes on the Third Reich[9], he doesn’t have much good to say about them, apart from admitting that the milieu they emerged from in the 1920s had had potential, and that he had respect for the SS for being an order along the lines of what he had desired to see in Italy. But the Third Reich itself he faulted for being too populist and bourgeois, and he disliked the Nazis’ scientific, dogmatic approach to race and their obsession with racial purity. If you compare what he says about the Nazis with his book on Italian Fascism, Fascism Viewed from the Right[10], it’s quite clear that he believed that Fascism was the more dynamic and less reactionary of the two movements, and he appreciated the fact that Italy had retained its monarchy, whilst Germany was led only by a “bohemian Corporal,” to quote von Hindenburg.

The early 1940s saw the pinnacle of Evola’s involvement with Italian Fascism when he published a book called Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race. In this book, Evola outlined his idea of the various races of humanity as being like Platonic ideal types, and held that character was as important as biological factors in determining one’s racial essence. While Evola by no means discounted the importance of biology – this is something that his critics often get wrong – he did believe that it was possible for someone of purely Aryan blood to exhibit characteristics one usually finds among Jews or blacks, and that the converse was possible as well. Mussolini himself read the book and was very impressed with it, as he had been looking for a form of racial ideology which Fascism could adopt that would be distinct from Nazi race theory. He invited Evola for a meeting and tasked him with helping to develop a uniquely Fascist form of racialism.

Evola’s involvement with Fascism was cut short in July 1943, when Mussolini was overthrown by his own Fascist Grand Council after the Allies invaded the southern tip of Italy. Evola travelled to Germany and joined with those Fascist leaders who sought to reconstitute a new Fascist state in northern Italy, plans which came to fruition when Mussolini was rescued from prison by Otto Skorzeny in September. Evola was present at Hitler’s headquarters with other Italian leaders when Mussolini was brought there, and he assisted in setting up what became known as the Italian Social Republic. Evola returned to Rome and remained there until it was occupied by the Allies in June 1944. According to Evola’s diary, secret service men came to his mother’s door looking for him, and his mother delayed the men while Evola escaped out the back and then travelled north.

Evola found the Italian Social Republic disappointing, as it was even more strongly socialist in nature than Fascism’s original incarnation. But by this time, in the aftermath of their defeat in Russia and the imminent invasion of the Reich itself by the Allies, the National Socialists in Germany were becoming a lot less strict about picking their allies. Some researchers have claimed that Evola, acting on the Germans’ behalf, made use of his many contacts in the fascist and nationalist groups across Europe to keep many of them engaged in the war. We also know that in 1944, the SS brought Evola to Vienna, where they had archived the many esoteric and Masonic texts they had confiscated during their sweep across Europe. Evola was tasked with cataloging the materials and determining exactly what it was they had. And this was the work that Evola was engaged in during late 1944 and early 1945, while Allied bombers streaked overhead. Evola relates how, during this period, he “tested his fate” by going on solitary walks through the city during air raids, when everyone else was cowering in shelters. And on March 12, 1945, a Russian bomb exploded near Evola on one of these walks, injuring his spine, and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

After the war, Evola never again engaged with practical politics in any way, but he remained unapologetic for his views on Fascism and National Socialism, and even in his post-war writings he always restated that they had been superior to anything in our contemporary world. He also became something of a guru to the various Right-wing and neo-fascist groups which emerged in Italy in the first three decades after the war. Indeed, in 1951 he was charged with conspiring to revive Fascism. He was ultimately acquitted of the charges, and as part of his defense, he said, “My principles are only those which were accepted and seen as normal by every well-born person everywhere in the world prior to 1789.”

Although he remained on friendly terms with political activists, it seems that Evola himself gave up on the idea of a political solution to the problems of our age after 1945. His advice, as he offered in post-war writings such as his book Men Among the Ruins[11], was to establish orders of elite individuals who could preserve Traditional principles and pass them down through a chain of initiations until an age would return in which their seeds could again bear fruit. But Evola had no interest in the democratic party politics of our age.

Evola continued to write after the war, but his life otherwise remained unremarkable due to the constraints of his injury. He died at his apartment in Rome on June 11, 1974. But he had already left his mark on the Italian political scene. The leader of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, Giorgio Almirante, famously remarked of Evola that he was “our Marcuse, only better.”

So what does Evola have to say to us today? Would he tell us to vote for Trump or Le Pen? Would he tell us to build bombs and blow up the local shopping mall? Would he tell us to find a cave in a mountain somewhere and meditate for the rest of our lives?

Evola never developed anything like a political program or a plan of action, so in that sense I don’t think he has anything to offer. Evola always addressed the individual who has higher aspirations. So where I think he has value is in helping a Right-inclined individual to cope with living in a liberal, degenerate age.

First of all, I would say that, regardless of what one thinks of the heavy-duty metaphysics underlying his ideas, the concept of Tradition is a valuable one regardless. In our time, when politics is getting pettier than it has ever been before, I think it’s important that we keep in mind that our final goal is not simply ending immigration or voting out the liberals. Ultimately, we stand for a set of principles that have guided our civilization from its origins and that stand above everyday politics. Even if we could send out all of the non-whites from America and Europe tomorrow, the rot that is afflicting all of our minds and souls would still be there. We have to try to put ourselves in the mindset of our ancestors and what made them great. Our approaches might change, but the principles we stand for are timeless. When I’ve tried to think about what it is that most fundamentally distinguishes the various and sundry strands of the Right from the liberals, what it ultimately comes down to is that we believe that there is an essential meaning to things. There is something essential in being an American or a German or an Italian, and that’s why not just anyone can become one, just as there is something essential in being a man or a woman . . . and similarly, there is an essential difference between being a white person engaged in the life of your civilization as opposed to being a pop culture, fast food junkie sleepwalking through history who happens to have white skin.

Second, Evola was certainly hostile to political movements that relied on the masses rather than an elite, and even Fascism was woefully inadequate for him, which means that he no doubt wouldn’t have thought very highly of the populism of our time. But rather than being a dogmatist, I think Evola is just being realistic here. I’ve been involved with the Right in some capacity for about twenty years now, and there’s an ever-growing list of saviors that the Right has latched onto, developed unrealistic expectations for, and then become disillusioned with. Twenty years ago there was Jörg Haider. Ten years ago there was Ron Paul. Three years ago there was Putin. Last year, of course, we had Trump. I don’t mean to suggest that these people aren’t worth supporting or that there is no difference between them and their opponents. Nevertheless, we have to bear in mind that none of these people are Rightists in the true sense, and could not act as true Rightists even if they wanted to be, so any support we give to them or people like them is simply to choose the least bad option, not a good option. The system as it is currently constituted will never allow a candidate with genuine Right-wing principles to attain real power. This is something that Evola recognized and why he held himself aloof from the endless games and maneuverings and compromises of party politics, and this is why we should try not to pin our hopes and dreams to any of democracy’s shooting stars, but recognize that we’ve got to keep working in the shadows regardless of whatever’s happening on stage.

And lastly, the idea that we are living in Kali Yuga and that everything is inevitably doomed to collapse may seem like quite a black pill. But as I said before, I think it does accurately describe our situation. And also I think some people who claim to be Traditionalists tend to be too pessimistic when it comes to this, and actually overlook what Evola actually said about the possibilities of our time. In later life, Evola advocated for what he terms apoliteia, by which he meant disengagement from political affairs. But if you really examine what he says on the subject, he never advised that one shouldn’t become involved in politics. Rather, what he meant is that one shouldn’t become attached to whatever result might come from such activities. In this, again, Evola is being consistent with what many of the sacred texts have to say on this. So in other words, sure, get involved with a political party or join the military or vote for Trump or whatever, but do so because it helps you to attain the goals that you set for yourself rather than because you have staked everything on its success and will be shattered if it fails. In Kali Yuga, political restoration may not be possible, but the opportunity still remains for the individual to triumph over modernity in his own way. Besides which, the fact that we may lose the battle doesn’t mean that we are absolved of the responsibility of fighting it and standing for what is true.

The best illustration of this that I know of comes from the Bhagavad Gita. At the opening, a Prince, Arjuna, is preparing to fight a battle against an opposing army. Although he knows his cause is just, he hates war, and knows that there are members of his own family on the other side who he may have to kill in order to win. The god Krishna is acting as his advisor. Just before the battle, Arjuna loses his resolve, and tells Krishna that he will put down his weapons and go into the forest to meditate instead of fighting. Krishna basically says to him, “Stop being such a pussy! You’re a kshatriya (the Hindu warrior caste)! It’s your job to do your duty and fight for justice. Meditating in the forest is for brahmanas (priests).” The rest of the Gita is Krishna explaining the entire metaphysics of existence, and Arjuna’s place in it, and at the end, of course Arjuna does his duty.

And that’s how I see those of us here tonight. In spite of the million other things you could have been doing in this enormous and hyperactive city tonight, you decided to come here and meet with a group of some of the most hated people in America to listen to a lecture on Julius Evola. That clearly indicates that there’s something in you that has decided that there are more important things than just doing what everyone else expects you to do. So really, we’re already creating the “order” that Evola called for in order to preserve Tradition in the face of degeneracy. So let’s not despair about the latest headlines, but keep our heads up in the knowledge that, whatever happens, we are the ones who stand for what is timeless, and our day of victory will come, whether it is tomorrow or a thousand years from now.

samedi, 05 mai 2018

Evola’s Nietzschean Ethics: A Code of Conduct for the Higher Man in Kali Yuga

By Collin ClearyEx: http://www.counter-currents.com

The subtitle of the English translation of Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger (Cavalcare la Tigre) promises that it offers “A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul.”[1][2] As a result, one comes to the work with the expectation that it will constitute a kind of “self-help book” for Traditionalists, for “men against time.” One expects that Evola will offer moral support and perhaps even specific instructions for revolting against the modern world. Unfortunately, the subtitle proves misleading. Ride the Tiger is primarily devoted to an analysis of aspects of the present age of decline (the Kali Yuga): critiques of relativism, scientism, modern art, modern music, and of figures like Heidegger and Sartre; discussions of the decline of marriage, the relation between the sexes, drug use, and so forth. Many of the points Evola makes in this volume are made in his other works, sometimes at greater length and more lucidly.

For those seeking something like a “how to” guide for living as a Traditionalist, it is mainly the second division of the book (“In the World Where God is Dead”) that offers something, and chiefly it is to be found in Chapter Eight: “The Transcendent Dimension – ‘Life’ and ‘More than Life.’” My purpose in this essay is to piece together the miniature “survival manual” provided by Chapter Eight – some of which consists of little more than hints, conveyed in Evola’s often frustratingly opaque style. It is my view that what we find in these pages is of profound importance for anyone struggling to hold on to his sanity in the face of the decadence and dishonesty of today’s world. It is also essential reading for anyone seeking to achieve the ideal of “self-overcoming” taught by Evola – seeking, in other words, to “ride the tiger.”

The central figure of the book’s second part is unquestionably Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom Evola repeatedly refers. Evola’s attitude toward Nietzsche is critical. However, it is obvious that Nietzsche exercised a profound and positive influence on him. Indeed, virtually every recommendation Evola makes for living as a Traditionalist – in this section of the work, at least – is somehow derived from Nietzsche. This despite the fact that Nietzsche was not a Traditionalist – a fact of which Evola was well aware, and to which I shall turn later.

In the last paragraph of Chapter Seven, Evola announces that in the next chapter he will consider “a line of conduct during the reign of dissolution that is not suitable for everyone, but for a differentiated type, and especially for the heir to the man of the traditional world, who retains his roots in that world even though he finds himself devoid of any support for it in his outer existence.”[2][3] This “line of conduct” turns out, in Chapter Eight, to be based entirely on statements made by Nietzsche. That chapter opens with a continuation of the discussion of the man who would be “heir to the man of the traditional world.” Evola writes, “What is more, the essential thing is that such a man is characterized by an existential dimension not present in the predominant human type of recent times – that is, the dimension of transcendence.”[3][4]

Evola clearly regarded this claim as of supreme importance, since he places the entire sentence just quoted in italics. The sentence is important for two reasons. First, as it plainly asserts, it provides the key characteristic of the “differentiated type” for whom Evola writes, or for whom he prepares the ground. Second, the sentence actually provides the key point on which Evola parts company with Nietzsche: for all the profundity and inspiration Nietzsche can provide us, he does not recognize a “dimension of transcendence.” Indeed, he denigrates the very idea as a projection of “slave morality.” Our first step, therefore, must be to understand exactly what Evola means by “the dimension of transcendence.” Unfortunately, in Ride the Tiger Evola does not make this very easy. To anyone familiar with Evola’s other works, however, his meaning is clear.

“Dimension of transcendence” can be understood as having several distinct, but intimately-related meanings in Evola’s philosophy. First, the term “transcendence” simply refers to something existing apart from, or beyond the world around us. The “aristocrats of the soul” living in the Kali Yuga must live their lives in such a way that they “stand apart from” or transcend the world in which they find themselves. This is the meaning of the phrase “men against time,” which I have already used (and which derives from Savitri Devi). The “differentiated type” of which Evola writes is one who has differentiated himself from the times, and from the men who are like “sleepers” or pashu (beasts). Existing in the world in a physical sense, even playing some role (or roles) in that world, one nevertheless lives wholly apart from it at the same time, in a spiritual sense. This is the path of those who aim to “ride the tiger”: they do not separate themselves from the decay, like monks or hermits; instead they live in the midst of it, but remain uncorrupted. (This is also little different from what the Gurdjieffian tradition calls “the fourth way,” and it is the essence of the “Left-Hand Path” as described by Evola and others.)

However, there is another, deeper sense of the “dimension of transcendence.” The type of man of which Evola speaks is not simply reacting to the world in which he finds himself. This is not what his “apartness” consists in – not fundamentally. Nor does it consist in some kind of intellectual commitment to a “philosophy of Traditionalism,” as found in books by Evola and others. Rather, “transcendence” in the deepest sense refers to the Magnum Opus that is the aim of the “magic” or spiritual alchemy discussed by Evola in his most important works (chiefly Introduction to Magic and The Hermetic Tradition). “Transcendence” means the overcoming of the world and of the ego – really, of all manifestation, whether it is objective (“out there”) or subjective (“in here”). Such overcoming is the work of what is called in Vedanta the “witnessing consciousness.” Evola frequently calls this “the Self.” (For more on this teaching, see my essays “What is Odinism?[5]” in TYR, Vol. 4[6], and “On Being and Waking” in TYR, Vol. 5, forthcoming[7].)

These different senses of “transcendence” are intertwined. It is only through the second sense of “transcendence,” of the overcoming of all manifestation, that the first sense, standing apart from the modern world, can truly be achieved. The man who is “heir to the man of the traditional world” can retain “his roots in that world” only by the achievement of a state of being that is identical to that of the “highest type” of the traditional world. That type was also “differentiated”: set apart from other men. Fundamentally, however, to be a “differentiated type” does not mean to be differentiated from others. It refers to the state of one who has actively differentiated “himself” from all else, including “the ego.” This active differentiation is the same thing as “identification” with the Self – which, for Evola, is not the dissolution of oneself in an Absolute Other, but the transmutation of “oneself” into “the Self.” Further, the metaphysical differentiation just described is the only sure and true path to the “differentiation” exhibited by the man who lives in the Kali Yuga, but stands apart from it at the same time.

Much later I will discuss how and why Nietzsche fails to understand “the dimension of transcendence,” and how it constitutes the fatal flaw in his philosophy. Recognizing this, Evola nonetheless proceeds to draw from Nietzsche a number of principles which constitute the spirit of “the overman.”[4][8] Evola offers these as characterizing his own ideal type – with the crucial caveat that, contra Nietzsche, these principles are only truly realizable in a man who has realized in himself the “dimension of transcendence.” Basically, there are ten such principles cited by Evola, each of which he derives from statements made by Nietzsche. The passage in which these occur is highly unusual, since it consists in one long sentence (lasting more than a page), with each principle set off by semi-colons. I will now consider each of these points in turn.

1. “The power to make a law for oneself, the ‘power to refuse and not to act when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodigious force and an enormous tension.’”[5][9] This first principle is crucial, and must be discussed at length. Earlier, in Chapter Seven (“Being Oneself”), Evola quotes Nietzsche saying, “We must liberate ourselves from morality so that we can live morally.”[6][10] Evola correctly notes that in such statements, and in the idea of “making a law for oneself,” Nietzsche is following in the footsteps of Kant, who insisted that genuine morality is based upon autonomy – which literally means “a law to oneself.” This is contrasted by Kant to heteronomy (a term Evola also uses in this same context): morality based upon external pressures, or upon fealty to laws established independent of the subject (e.g., following the Ten Commandments, conforming to public opinion, acting so as to win the approval of others, etc.). This is the meaning of saying, “we must liberate ourselves from morality [i.e., from externally imposed moral commandments] so that we can live morally [i.e., autonomously].” In order for the subject’s standpoint to be genuinely moral, he must in a sense “legislate” the moral law for himself, and affirm it as reasonable. Indeed, for Kant, ultimately the authority of the moral law consists in our “willing” it as rational.

Of course, Nietzsche’s position is not Kant’s, though Evola is not very helpful in explaining to us what the difference consists in. He writes that Nietzsche’s notion of autonomy is “on the same lines” as Kant’s “but with the difference that the command is absolutely internal, separate from any external mover, and is not based on a hypothetical law extracted from practical reason that is valid for all and revealed to man’s conscience as such, but rather on one’s own specific being.”[7][11] There are a good deal of confusions here – so much so that one wonders if Evola has even read Kant. For instance, Kant specifically rejects the idea of an “external mover” for morality (which is the same thing as heteronomy). Further, there is nothing “hypothetical” about Kant’s moral law, the “categorical imperative,” which he specifically defines in contrast to “hypothetical imperatives.” We may also note the vagueness of saying that “the command” must be based “on one’s specific being.”

Still, through this gloom one may detect exactly the position that Evola correctly attributes to Nietzsche. Like Kant, Nietzsche demands that the overman practice autonomy, that he give a law to himself. However, Kant held that our self-legislation simultaneously legislates for others: the law I give to myself is the law I would give to any other rational being. The overman, by contrast, legislates for himself only – or possibly for himself and the tiny number of men like him. If we recognize fundamental qualitative differences between human types, then we must consider the possibility that different rules apply to them. Fundamental to Kant’s position is the egalitarian assertion that people do not get to “play by their own rules” (indeed, for Kant the claim to be an exception to general rules, or to make an exception for oneself, is the marker of immorality). If we reject this egalitarianism, then it does indeed follow that certain special individuals get to play by their own rules.

This does not mean that for the self-proclaimed overman “anything goes.” Indeed, any individual who would interpret the foregoing as licensing arbitrary self-indulgence of whims or passions would be immediately disqualified as a potential overman. This will become crystal clear as we proceed with the rest of Evola’s “ten principles” in Chapter Eight. For the moment, simply look once more at the wording Evola borrows from Nietzsche in our first “principle”: the “power to refuse and not to act when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodigious force and an enormous tension.” To refuse what? What sort of force? What sort of tension? The claim seems vague, yet it is actually quite clear: autonomy means, fundamentally, the power to say no to whatever forces or tensions press us to affirm them or give way to them.

The “forces” in question could be internal or external: they could be the force of social and environmental circumstances; they could be the force of my own passions, habits, and inclinations. It is a great folly to think that my passions and such are “mine,” and that in following them I am “free.” Whatever creates an “enormous tension” in me and demands I give way, whether it comes from “in me” or “outside me” is precisely not mine. Only the autonomous “I” that can seethis is “mine,” and only it can say no to these forces. It has “the power to refuse and not to act.” Essentially, Nietzsche and Evola are talking about self-mastery. This is the “law” that the overman – and the “differentiated type” – gives to himself. And clearly it is not “universalizable”; the overman does not and cannot expect others to follow him in this.[8][12]

In short, this first principle asks of us that we cultivate in ourselves the power to refuse or to negate – in one fashion or other – all that which would command us. Again, this applies also to forces within me, such as passions and desires. Such refusal may not always amount to literally thwarting or annihilating forces that influence us. In some cases, this is impossible. Our “refusal” may sometimes consist only in seeing the force in question, as when I see that I am acting out of ingrained habit, even when, at that moment, I am powerless to resist. Such “seeing” already places distance between us and the force that would move us: it says, in effect, “I am not that.” As we move through Evola’s other principles, we will learn more about the exercise of this very special kind of autonomy.

2. “The natural and free asceticism moved to test its own strength by gauging ‘the power of a will according to the degree of resistance, pain, and torment that it can bear in order to turn them to its own advantage.’”[9][13] Here we have another expression of the “autonomy” of the differentiated type. Such a man tests his own strength and will, by deliberately choosing that which is difficult. Unlike the Last Man, who has left “the regions where it is hard to live,”[10][14] the overman/differentiated man seeks them out.

Evola writes that “from this point of view everything that existence offers in the way of evil, pain, and obstacles . . . is accepted, even desired.”[11][15] This may be the most important of all the points that Evola makes in this chapter – and it is a principle that can serve as a lifeline for all men living in the Kali Yuga, or in any time. If we can live up to this principle, then we have made ourselves truly worthy of the mantle of “overman.” The idea is this: can I say “yes” to whatever hardship life offers me? Can I use all of life’s suffering and evils as a way to test and to transform myself? Can I forge myself in the fire of suffering? And, going a step further, can I desire hardship and suffering? It is one thing, of course, to accept some obstacle or calamity as a means to test myself. It is quite another to actively desire such things.

Here we must consider our feelings very carefully. Personally, I do not fear my own death nearly as much as the death of those close to me. And I fear my own physical incapacitation and decline more than death. Is it psychologically realistic for me to desire the death of my loved ones, or desire a crippling disease, as a way to test myself? No, it is not – and this is not what Evola and Nietzsche mean. Rather, the mental attitude in question is one where we say a great, general “yes” to all that life can bring in the way of hardship. Further, we welcome such challenges, for without them we would not grow. It is not that we desire this specific calamity or that, but we do desire, in general, to be tested. And, finally, we welcome such testing with supreme confidence: whatever life flings at me, I will overcome. In a sense, I will absorb all negativity and only grow stronger by means of it.

3. Evola next speaks of the “principle of not obeying the passions, but of holding them on a leash.” Then he quotes Nietzsche: “greatness of character does not consist in not having such passions: one must have them to the greatest degree, but held in check, and moreover doing this with simplicity, not feeling any particular satisfaction thereby.”[12][16] This follows from the very first principle, discussed earlier. To repeat, giving free rein to our passions has nothing to do with autonomy, freedom, or mastery. Indeed, it is the primary way in which the common man finds himself controlled.

To see this, one must be able to recognize “one’s own” passions as, in reality, other. I do not choose these things, or the power they exert. What follows from this, however, is not necessarily thwarting those passions or “denying oneself.” As Evola explains in several of his works, the Left-Hand Path consists precisely in making use of that which would enslave or destroy a lesser man. We hold the passions “on a leash,” Evola says. The metaphor is appropriate. Our passions must be like well-trained dogs. Such animals are filled with passionate intensity for the chase – but their master controls them completely: at a command, they run after their prey, but only when commanded. As Nietzsche’s words suggest, the greatest man is not the man whose passions are weak. A man with weak passions finds them fairly easy to control! The superior man is one whose passions are incredibly strong – one in whom the “life force” is strong – but who holds those passions in check.

4. Nietzsche writes, “the superior man is distinguished from the inferior by his intrepidity, by his defiance of unhappiness.”[13][17] Here too we have invaluable advice for living. The intrepid man is fearless and unwavering; he endures. But why does Nietzsche connect this with “defiance of unhappiness”? The answer is that just as the average man is a slave to the passions that sweep him away at any given time, so he is also a prisoner of his “moods.” Most men rise in the morning and find themselves in one mood or another: “today I am happy,” “today I am sad.” They accept that, in effect, some determination has been made for them, and that they are powerless in the matter. If the unhappiness endures, they have a “disease” which they look to drugs or alcohol to cure.

As with the passions, the average man “owns” his moods: “this unhappiness is mine, it is me,” he says, in effect. The superior man learns to see his moods as if they were the weather – or, better yet, as if they were minor demons besetting him: external mischief makers, to whom he has the power to say “yes” or “no.” The superior man, upon finding that he feels unhappiness, says “ah yes, there it is again.” Immediately, seeing “his” unhappiness as other – as a habit, a pattern, a kind of passing mental cloud – he refuses identification with it. And he sets about intrepidly conquering unhappiness. He will not acquiesce to it.

5. The above does not mean, however, that the superior man intrepidly sets about trying to make himself “happy.” Evola quotes Nietzsche as saying “it is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle.”[14][18] The superior man responds with incredulity to those who “point the way to happiness,” and respond, “But what does happiness mean to us?”[15][19] The preoccupation with “happiness” is characteristic of the inferior modern type Nietzsche refers to as “the Last Man” (“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.”[16][20]

But if we do not seek happiness, in the name of what do we “defy unhappiness”? Answer: in the name of greatness, self-mastery, self-overcoming. Kant can be of some limited help to us here as well, for he said that the aim of life should not be happiness, but making oneself worthy of happiness. Many individuals may achieve happiness (actually, the dumber one is, the greater one’s chances). But only some are worthy of happiness. The superior man is worthy of happiness, whether he has it or not. And he does not care either way. He does not even aim, really, to be worthy of happiness, but to be worthy of greatness, like Aristotle’s “great-souled man” (megalopsuchos).[17][21]

6. According to Evola, the superior man claims the right (quoting Nietzsche) “to exceptional acts as attempts at victory over oneself and as acts of freedom . . . to assure oneself, with a sort of asceticism, a preponderance and a certitude of one’s own strength of will.”[18][22] This point is related to the second principle, discussed earlier. The superior man is master, first and foremost, of himself. He therefore seeks opportunities to test himself in exceptional ways. Evola provides an extended discussion of one form of such self-testing in his Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (and, of course, for Evola mountain climbing was not entirely metaphorical!). Through such opportunities, one “assures oneself” of the strength of one’s will. But there is more: through such tests, one’s will becomes even stronger.

“Asceticism” suggests self-denial. But how does such testing of the will constitute “denying oneself”? The key, of course, lies in asking “what is my self?” The self that is denied in such acts of “self-mastery” is precisely the self that seeks to hold on to life, to safety, to security, and to its ephemeral preoccupations and possessions. We “deny” this self precisely by threatening what it values most. To master it is to progressively still its voice and loosen its hold on us. It is in this fashion that a higher self – what Evola, again, calls the Self – grows in us.

7. The superior man affirms the freedom which includes “keeping the distance which separates us, being indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privations, even to life itself.”[19][23] This mostly reaffirms points made earlier. But what is “the distance that separates us”? Here Nietzsche could be referring to hierarchy, or what he often calls “the order of rank.” He could also be referring to the well-known desire of the superior man for apartness, verging sometimes on a desire for isolation. The superior man takes himself away from others; he has little need for the company of human beings, unless they are like himself. And even then, he desires the company of such men only in small and infrequent doses. He is repulsed by crowds, and by situations that force him to feel the heat and breath and press of others. Such feelings are an infallible marker of the superior soul – but they are not a “virtue” to be cultivated. One either has such feelings, or one does not. One is either the superior type, or a “people person.”

If we consult the context in which the quote appears – an important section of Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche offers us little help in understanding specifically what he means by “the distance that separates us.” But the surrounding context is a goldmine of reflections on the superior type, and it is surprising that Evola does not quote it more fully. Nietzsche remarks that “war educates for freedom” (a point on which Evola reflects at length in his Metaphysics of War), then writes:

For what is freedom? Having the will to responsibility for oneself. Maintaining the distance that separates us. Becoming indifferent to trouble, hardships, deprivation, even to life. Being ready to sacriﬁce people to one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts, the instincts that celebrate war and winning, dominate other instincts, for example the instinct for “happiness.” The human being who has become free, not to mention the spirit that has become free, steps all over the contemptible sort of wellbeing dreamt of by grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free human being is a warrior.[20][24]

The rest of the passage is well worth reading.

8. Evola tells us that the superior man rejects “the insidious confusion between discipline and enfeeblement.” The goal of discipline is not to produce weakness, but a greater strength. “He who does not dominate is weak, dissipated, inconstant.” To discipline oneself is to dominate one’s passions. As we saw in our discussion of the third principle, this does not mean stamping out the passions or denying them. Neither does it mean indulging them: the man who heedlessly indulges his passions becomes “weak, dissipated, inconstant.” Rather, the superior man learns how to control his passions and to make use of them as a means for self-transformation. It is only when the passions are mastered – when we have reached the point that we cannot be swept away by them – that we can give expression to them in such a way that they become vehicles for self-overcoming.

Evola quotes Nietzsche: “Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it; and almost all the passions have been brought into ill repute on account of those who were not sufficiently strong to employ them.”[21][25] The convergence of Nietzsche’s position with Evola’s portrayal of the Left-Hand Path could not be clearer. The superior man has a right to “excess” because, unlike the common man, he is not swept away by the passions. He holds them “on a leash” (see earlier), and uses them as means to transcend the ego, and to achieve a higher state. The common man, who identifies with his passions, becomes wholly a slave to them, and is sucked dry. He gives “excess” a bad reputation.

9. Evola’s penultimate principle is in the spirit of Nietzsche, but does not quote from him. Evola writes: “To point the way of those who, free from all bonds, obeying only their own law, are unbending in obedience to it and above every human weakness.”[22][26] The first words of this passage are somewhat ambiguous: what does Evola mean by “to point the way of those who . . .” (the original Italian – l’indicare la via di coloro che – is no more helpful). Perhaps what is meant here is simply that the superior type points the way for others. He serves as an example – or he serves as the vanguard. This is not, of course, an ideal to which just anyone can aspire. But the example of the superior man can serve to “awaken” others who have the same potential. This was, indeed, something like Nietzsche’s own literary intention: to point the way to the Overman; to awaken those whose souls are strong enough.

10. Finally, Evola tells us that the superior type is “heir to the equivocal virtus of the Renaissance despots,” and that he is “capable of generosity, quick to offer manly aid, of ‘generous virtue,’ magnanimity, and superiority to his own individuality.”[23][27] Here Evola alludes to Nietzsche’s qualified admiration for Cesare Borgia (who Nietzsche offers as an example of what he calls the “men of prey”). The rest of the quote, however, calls to mind Aristotle’s description of the great-souled man – especially the use of the term “magnanimity,” which some translators prefer to “greatness of soul.”[24][28] The superior man is not a beast. He is capable of such virtues as generosity and benevolence. This is because he is free from that which holds lesser men in thrall. The superior man can be generous with such things as money and possessions, for these have little or no value for him. He can be generous in overlooking the faults of others, for he expects little of them anyway. He can even be generous in forgiving his enemies – when they are safely at his feet. The superior man can do all of this because he possesses “superiority to his own individuality”: he is not bound to the pretensions of his own ego, and to the worldly goods the ego craves.

Evola’s very long sentence about the superior man now ends with the following summation:

all these are the positive elements that the man of Tradition also makes his own, but which are only comprehensible and attainable when ‘life’ is ‘more than life,’ that is, through transcendence. They are values attainable only by those in whom there is something else, and something more, than mere life.

In other words, Nietzsche presents us with a rich and inspiring portrayal of the superior man. And yet, the principles he discusses will have a positive result, and serve the “man of Tradition,” only if we turn Nietzsche on his head. Earlier in Chapter Eight, Evola writes: “Nietzsche’s solution of the problem of the meaning of life, consisting in the affirmation that this meaning does not exist outside of life, and that life in itself is meaning . . . is valid only on the presupposition of a being that has transcendence as its essential component.” (Evola places this entire statement in italics.) In other words, to put the matter quite simply, the meaning of life as life itself is only valid when a man’s life is devoted to transcendence (in the senses discussed earlier). Or we could say, somewhat more obscurely, that Nietzsche’s points are valid when man’s life transcends life.

Evola’s claim goes to the heart of his criticism of Nietzsche. A page later, he speaks of conflicting tendencies within Nietzsche’s thought. On the one hand, we have a “naturalistic exaltation of life” that runs the risk of “a surrender of being to the simple world of instincts and passions.” The danger here is that these will then assert themselves “through the will, making it their servant.”[25][29] Nietzsche, of course, is famous for his theory of the “will to power.” But surrender to the baser impulses of ego and organism will result in those impulses hijacking will and using it for their own purposes. One then becomes a slave to instincts and passions, and the antithesis of a free, autonomous being.

On the other hand, one finds in Nietzsche “testimonies to a reaction to life that cannot arise out of life itself, but solely from a principle superior to it, as revealed in a characteristic phrase: ‘Spirit is the life that cuts through life’ (Geist ist das Leben, das selber ins Leben schneidet).” In other words, Nietzsche’s thought exhibits a fundamental contradiction – a contradiction that cannot be resolved within his thought, but only in Evola’s. One can find other tensions in Nietzsche’s thought as well. I might mention, for example, his evident preference for the values of “master morality,” and his analysis of “slave morality” as arising from hatred of life — which nevertheless co-exist with his relativism concerning values. Yet there is so much in Nietzsche that is brilliant and inspiring, we wish we could accept the whole and declare ourselves Nietzscheans. But we simply cannot. This turns out to be no problem, since Evola absorbs what is positive and useful in Nietzsche, and places it within the context of Tradition. In spite of what Nietzsche himself may say, one feels he is more at home with Tradition, than with “perspectivism.”[26][30]

Evola’s ten “Nietzschean principles,” reframed for the “man of Tradition,” provide an inspiring guide for life in this Wolf Age. They point the way. They show us what we must become. These are ideas that challenge us to become worthy of them.

[8][38] There is a great deal more that can be said here about the difference between Kantian and Nietzschean “autonomy.” Indeed, there is an argument to be made that Kant is much closer to Nietzsche than Evola (or Nietzsche) would allow. Ultimately, one sees the stark difference between Kant and Nietzsche in the “egalitarianism” of the different formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative. How can a man who is qualitatively different and superior to others commit to following no other law than what he would will all others follow? How can he affirm the inherent “dignity” in others, who seem to have no dignity at all? Should he affirm their potential dignity, which they themselves simply do not see and may never live up to? But suppose they are so limited, constitutionally, that actualizing that “human dignity” is more or less impossible for them? Kant wants us to affirm that whatever men may actually be, they are nonetheless potentially rational, and thus they possess inherent dignity. For those of us who have seen more of the world than Königsberg, and who have soured on the dreams of Enlightenment, this rings hollow. And how can the overman be expected to adhere to the (self-willed) command to always treat others as ends in themselves, but never as means only – when the vast bulk of humanity seems hardly good for anything other than being used as means to the ends of greater men?

[9][39] The translator’s note: “Adapted from Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,’ sect. 38, where, however, it is ‘freedom’ that is thus gauged.” Beware: Evola sometimes alters Nietzsche’s wording.

[21][51] Here I have substituted the translation of Walter Kaufmann and R. G. Hollingdale for the one provided in Ride the Tiger, as it is more accurate and concise. See The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 408.

[26][56] Evola writes (p. 52), “[Nietzsche’s] case illustrates in precise terms what can, and indeed must, occur in a human type in which transcendence has awakened, yes, but who is uncentered with regard to it.”

jeudi, 09 novembre 2017

As traditionalists (1), we believe in the doctrine of cosmic cycles (2) and therefore we know that our present time matches with the last cycle, the one which is known by the name of Kali-Yuga (3). This particular cycle is the darkest one of all four cycles and affects every aspects of life in general. Thus human beings, civilizations and politics cannot escape its corrupting power. This is an important fact to keep in mind.

However, the cycle ends only to start up again with the first one, the Golden age or Krita-Yuga, the dark days leaves room for a new era. Yet in the meantime some of us, the youth, feels the urge for political action but need a strong formation to face the abominations of our post-modern societies. Right-wing is a wide concept after all, as it is the same for the Left. In France – we give this example because we know the situation of this country very well – the Right means ‘Economic Right’, even if it appears sometimes more progressive, sometimes more conservative. Within its scale of principals, the economic principle is always the highest and all the others are subordinated to it. Here is a clear example of a final stage of involution.

The definition of what should be considered the real Right is an imperative task. Among the numerous topics he dealt with through his writings, Julius Evola wrote numerous articles about that question. The Italian philosopher, often reduced to an ‘esoteric fascist’, embodies himself the man of the Right. His writings but especially his deeds made him a living example of the uprightness one would try to attain. The neo-fascist youth of post WW2 Italy was not wrong to seek all the gems herein Evola’s books in order to build its doctrine.

Originally published in Hungarian at the end of 2012 as an anthology of Evola’s articles about the youth and the Right, A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth is now available thanks to Arktos in English. We hope that a french version will see the day sooner or later. Indeed, Evola’s influence on the now famous french Nouvelle Droite and all its heirs (from identitarians to national-revolutionary and traditionalist-revolutionary militants), not to mention the founder of this website Georges Feltin-Tracol (4), contributors Daniel Cologne (5) and ourselves, is simply huge.

A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth contains seventeen texts, mostly press articles but also some excerpts from books like The Bow and the Club and the entire essay Orientations. It includes a foreword by Gabor Vona who is the Chairman of Jobbik and bibliographical notes by Robert Horvath. We also must stress the numerous footnotes and the quality of their explanations. The reader ends up with a handbook intended for militants but also for anyone yearning to discover Julius Evola.

As the title suggests, the two main subjects are the Right and the Youth. The first one was a common topic developed by the author along his writings. In fact the Right follows the Italian writer like his shadow. Julius Evola remains the most political awakener of the Tradition. He always considered himself a man of the Right, he wrote about the Right and his critics and stances outlined a doctrine, even better, a view of the world from the Right:

‘Yet it is also possible to leave all institutional assumptions aside and speak of the Right as a spiritual orientation and worldview. Aside from opposing democracy and all ‘socialists’ myths, belonging to the Right means upholding the values of Tradition as spiritual, aristocratic, and warrior values (possibly with references to a strict military tradition, as in the case of Prussianism, for instance). Moreover, it means harboring a certain contempt for intellectualism and for the bourgeois fetishism of the ‘cultured man’ [...]’ (p.50.).

Throughout the different texts herein the book, Julius Evola stresses how the real Right is: anti-egalitarian, anti-materialistic, anti-democratic but spiritual and heroic. In one word traditionalist: ‘In this sense, the concept of Tradition applies to a system in which ‘all activities are in principle ordered from above and have an upward direction’ (p.37.). In addition, Julius Evola aims at the main sources of infection which must be fought according to him (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, existentialism and Darwinism) and give some clues on the cultural domains that the Right should focus on, one of them being the historiography.

About the second subject Robert Harvath points out ‘that the subject of youth was not among Evola’s central concerns; it’s a thin, but visible, line that runs throughout his entire oeuvre’ (p.150.). When writing about the Youth, Julius Evola either encourages an autre jeunesse or, on the contrary, criticizes it. The latter belongs to the average youth so to speak and Evola focused especially his critics on students and beatniks like in Against the Youth or Some Observations on the Student Movement, both featuring in this handbook.

Julius Evola wrote his first post WW2 writings for the young Italian neo-fascist militants. He does not write about what has to be done but how to be:

‘Not letting oneself go is what is crucial today. In this society gone astray, one must be capable of the luxury of having a character. One ought to be such that, even before being recognized as the champion of a political idea, one will display a certain conduct of life, an inner coherence, and a style consisting of uprightness and intellectual courage in every human relationship’(p.1).

‘As spirit there exists something that can serve as an outline for the forces of resistance: it is the legionary spirit. It is the attitude of one who knows how to choose the hardest life, to fight even when he knows that the battle is substantially lost, and to confirm the words of the ancient saga: ‘loyalty is stronger than fire’. Through him the traditional idea is affirmed’(p.7).

‘Inner action must precede all other actions’(p.3).

We believe that these advice are of first-hand importance even if Evola wrote about more strictly political themes like the imperial idea, corporatism, occult war or the ‘demonic possession of the economy’. Some people like Claudio Mutti hastily made Evola an admirer of islam since he positively showed to his readers the warlike mentality of this particular religion and its concept of greater jihad. What he wanted to show (and mostly liked) is this ascetic process, this almost alchemical transformation of oneself to reach something higher. His interests for magic, which he explored in company of Arturo Reghini (6) in the Ur-group, his interest for vamachara tantra or mountaineering are facts that tend to prove our point.

Concerning this collection of texts, we could have appreciated if the last parts of Evola’s Ride the Tiger (6) which consist in a bunch of precepts to be and become in this dark age of Kali-Yuga could have been added. Also, and this would have been a necessary addition according to us, some texts or excerpts from his writings about race, which would have been an excellent correcting concerning racialism.

To conclude, A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth is definitely a must have for any political and metapolitical militants, for every men of the Right in its true essence. We strongly believe that Western societies need a renewal of the Right, not to say a revolution. Gabor Vona pointed out a real problem in nowadays ‘real right’:

‘The tragedy of this situation is that the tools of the Left are infectious. This creates a political catastrophe, which is extremely common nowadays: the landscape of the so-called Right is in reality becoming more and more filled with Leftist ideas, and allows the Left’s borders to approach closer and closer, displaying and mainstreaming the pseudo- or fake Rightism. Of course, this results in total confusion, schizophrenia, and a chaos of ideas’ (p.11. Of the foreword).

This is the greater danger the real Right faces now. National-Bolshevism and nazi-maoism left aside (even if their Third-Worldism was ideologically harmful), we clearly identify a strong ‘leftisation’ of the French Nouvelle Droite (especially of one of its prominent figure Alain de Benoist) and what the mass media names Far-Right. The prevalence of the social and economic question, the critics of liberalism from a marxist perspective and worse, the abandonment of the defense of our people’s race – the number one emergency for most of western European countries – and the will to even avoid such words and topics are true signs of degeneracy. We do not have the time and should not bother analyzing the causes; the fruit is too far rotten. The time to rebuild a true Right is now. Julius Evola’s books and A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth are more than necessary readings in order to set les idées à l’endroit!

Thierry Durolle

Footnotes:

(1) By ‘traditionalist’ we mean someone who refers to the meaning of the word explained by René Guénon.

(2) The doctrine of cosmic cycles is often understood as Hindu concept, yet it corresponds to Hesiod’s ages of Man as well.

(3) It is the same than Hesiod’s age of iron or Nordic age of the wolf.

(4) Born in 1970, Georges Feltin-Tracol is the editor-in-chief of the Europe Maxima website as well as the author of numerous books and articles. Being a long time militant for the Greater Europe, he always claimed Julius Evola’s influence on his work.

(5) Born in 1946, Daniel Cologne is a journalist and essayist. He wrote several books about Tradition and worked with the traditionalist magazine Totalité.

(6) Born in 1878, Arturo Reghini was an Italian free-mason and was considered as the most famous Italian Pythagorean.

(7) Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, Inner Traditions, 2003, 256 pages.

mardi, 20 septembre 2016

Rightist Critique of Racial Materialism

While France and England gave materialistic, anti-traditional expressions to the concept of “the people” that was taking shape since the French Revolution, German Idealism was a return to a spiritual, metaphysical direction. The German Revolution moved in a volkish direction, where the volk was seen as the basis of the state, and the notion of a volk-soul that guided the formation and development of nations became a predominant theme that came into conflict with the French bourgeois liberal-democratic ideals derived from Jacobinism. Fichte had laid the foundations of a German nationalism in 1807-1808 with his Addresses to the German Nation. Although like possibly all revolutionaries or radicals of the time, beginning under the impress of the French Revolution, by the time he had delivered his addresses to the German nation, he had already rejected Jacobinism. Johann Heder had previously sought to establish the concept of the volk-soul, and of each nation being guided by a spirit. This was a metaphysical conception of race, or more accurately volk, that preceded the biological arguments of the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau. Herder stated that the volk is the only class, and includes both King and peasant, and that “the people” are not the same as the rabble that are championed by Jacobinism and later Marxism.

French and English racism was introduced to Germany by the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain who had a seminal influence on Hitlerism. English Darwinism, a manifestation of the materialistic Zeitgeist that dominated England, was brought to Germany by Ernst Haeckel; although Blumenbach had already begun to classify race according to cranial measurements during the 18th century. Nonetheless, biological racism reflects the English Zeitgeist of materialism. It provided primary materialistic doctrines to dethrone Tradition. Its application to economics also provided a scientific justification for the “class struggle” of both the capitalistic and socialistic varieties. Hitlerism was an attempt to synthesis the English eugenics of Galton and the evolution of Darwin with the metaphysis of German Idealism. Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola attempted to counter the later influence of Hitlerian racism on Italian Fascism by developing a “metaphysical racism,” and the concept of the “race of the spirit,” which has its parallels in Spengler, whose approach to race is in the Traditionalist mode of the German Idealists.

Because the Right, the custodian of Tradition within the epoch of decay, has been infected by the spirit of materialism, there is often a focus on secondary symptoms of culture disease, such as in particular immigration, rather than primary symptoms such as usury and plutocracy. “Race” becomes a matter of skull measuring, rather than spirit, élan and character. Hence the character of a civilisation and of a people is discerned via the types of bone and skull found amidst the ruins. History then becomes a matter of counting and measuring and statistics. How feeble such attempts remain is demonstrated by the years of controversy surrounding the racial identity of Kennewick Man in North America, having first thought to have been a Caucasian, and now concluded to have been of Ainu/Polynesian descent. The Traditionalist does not discount “race”. Rather it plays a central role. How “race” is defined is another matter.

Trotsky called “racism” “Zoological materialism”. As an “economic materialist”, that is, a Marxist, he did not explain why his own version of materialism is a superior mode of thinking and acting than the other. They arose, along with Free Trade capitalism, out of the same Zeitgeist that dominated England at the time, and all three refer to a naturalistic life as struggle. The Traditionalist rejects all forms of materialism. The Traditionalist does not see history as unfolding according to material, economic forces, or racial-biological determinants. The Traditionalist sees history as the unfolding of metaphysical forces manifesting within the terrestrial. Spengler, although not a Perennial Traditionalist, intuited history over a broad expanse as a metaphysical unfolding. Although a man of the “Right”, he rejected the biological interpretation of history as much as the economic. So did Evola.

The best known exponents of racial determinism were of course German National Socialists, the reductionist doctrine being expressed by Hitler:

“…This is how civilisations and empires break up and make room for new creations. Blood mixture, and the lowering of the racial level which accompanies it, are the one and only cause why old civilisations disappear…”

The USA provided a large share of racial theorists of the early 20th century, whose conception of the rise and fall of civilisation was based on racial zoology, and in particular on the superiority of the Nordic not only above non-white races, but above all sub-races of the white, such as the Dinaric, Mediterranean and Alpine. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi wrote a book championing the cause of segregation, and more so, the “back-to-Africa” movement, stating that miscegenation with the Negro will result in the fall of white civilisation. He briefly examined some major civilisations. Bilbo wrote that Egyptian civilisation was mongrelised over centuries, “until a mulatto inherited the throne of the Pharaohs in the Twenty-fifth dynasty. This mongrel prince, Taharka, ruled over a Negroid people whose religion had fallen from an ethical test for the life after death to a form of animal worship”. This should be “sufficient warning to white America!” Because Sen. Bilbo had started from an assumption, his history was flawed. As will be shown below, it was Taharka and the Nubian dynasty that renewed Egypt’s decaying culture, which had degenerated under the white Libyan dynasties. Sen. Bilbo proceeds with similar brief examinations of Carthage, Greece, and Rome.

Julius Evola, while repudiating the zoological primacy of “racism” as another form of materialism and therefore anti-Traditional, suggested that a “spiritual racism” is necessary to oppose the forces seeking to turn man into an amorphous mass; as interchangeable economic units without roots; what is now called “globalisation”.

Evola gives the Traditionalist viewpoint when stating that there “have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands”. He gives Sweden and The Netherlands as recent examples, pointing out that although the race has remained unchanged, there is little of the “heroic disposition” those cultures possessed just several centuries previously. He refers to other great cultures as having remained in a state as if like mummies, inwardly dead, awaiting a push “to knock them down”. These are what Spengler called Fellaheen, spiritually exhausted and historically passé. Evola gives Peru as an example of how readily a static culture succumbed to Spain. Hence, such examples, even as vigorous cultures such as that of the Dutch and Scandinavian, once wide-roaming and dynamic, have declined to nonentities despite the maintenance of racial homogeneity.

The following considers examples that are often cited as civilisations that decayed and died as the result of miscegenation.

Greek

A case study for testing the miscegenation theory of cultural decay is that of the Hellenic. The ancient Hellenic civilisation is typically ascribed by racial theorists as being the creation of a Nordic culture-bearing stratum. The same has been said of the Latin, Egyptian, and others. Typically, this theory is illustrated by depicting sculptures of ancient Hellenes of “Nordic” appearance. Such depictions upon which to form a theory are unreliable: the ancient Hellenes were predominantly a mixture of Dinaric-Alpine-Mediterranean. The skeletal remains of Greeks show that from earliest times to the present there has been remarkable uniformity, according to studies by Sergi, Ripley, and Buxton, who regarded the Greeks as an Alpine-Mediterranean mix from a “comparatively early date.” American physical anthropologist Carlton S. Coon stated that the Greeks remain an Alpine/Mediterranean mix, with a weak Nordic element, being “remarkably similar” to their ancient ancestors.

American anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel, in the most complete study of Greek skeletal remains starting from the Neolithic era to the present, found that Greeks have always bene marked by a sustained racial continuity. Angel cited American anthropologist Buxton who had studied Greek skeletal material and measured modern Greeks, especially in Cyprus, concluding that the modern Greeks “possess physical characteristics not differing essentially from those of the former [ancient Greeks]”. The most extensive study of modern Greeks was conducted by anthropologist Aris N. Poulianos, concluding that Greeks are and have always been Mediterranean-Dinaric, with a strong Alpine presence. Angel states that “Poulianos is correct in pointing out ... that there is complete continuity genetically from ancient to modern times”. Nikolaos Xirotiris did not find any significant alteration of the Greek race from prehistory, through classical and medieval, to modern times. Anthropologist Roland Dixon studied the funeral masks of Spartans and identified them as of the Alpine sub-race. Although race theorists often stated that Hellenic civilisation was founded and maintained by invading Dorian “Nordics”, Angel states that the northern invasions were always of “Dinaroid-Alpine” type. A recent statistical comparison of ancient and modern Greek skulls found “a remarkable similarity in craniofacial morphology between modern and ancient Greeks.”

If miscegenation and the elimination of an assumed Nordic (Dorian) culture-bearing stratum cannot account for the decay of Hellenic civilisation, what can? Contemporary historians point out the origins. The Roman historian Livy observed:

“The Macedonians who settled in Alexandria in Egypt, or in Seleucia, or in Babylonia, or in any of their other colonies scattered over the world, have degenerated into Syrians, Parthians, or Egyptians. Whatever is planted in a foreign land, by a gradual change in its nature, degenerates into that by which it is nurtured”.

Here Livy is observing that occupiers among foreign peoples “go native”, as one might say. The occupiers are pulled downward, rather than elevating their subjects upward, not through genetic contact but through moral and cultural corruption. The Syrians, Parthians and Egyptians, had already become historically and culturally passé, or Fellaheen, as Spengler puts it. The Macedonian Greeks in those colonies succumbed to the force of etiolation. Alexander even encouraged this in an effort to meld all subjects into one Greek mass, which resulted not from a Hellenic civilisation passed along by multitudinous peoples, but in a chaotic mass from which Greece did not recover, despite the Greeks staying racially intact. Unlike the Jews in particular, the Greeks, Romans and other conquerors did not have the strength of Tradition to maintain themselves among alien cultures. Dr. W. W. Tarn stated of this process:

“Greece was ready to adopt the gods of the foreigner, but the foreigner rarely reciprocated; Greek Doura (the Greek temple in Mesopotamia) freely admitted the gods of Babylon, but no Greek god entered Babylonian Uruk. Foreign gods might take Greek names; they took little else. They (the Babylonian gods) were the stronger, and the conquest of Asia (by the Greeks) was bound to fail as soon as the East had gauged its own strength and Greek weakness.”

Spengler pointed out to Western Civilisation and the current epoch that one of the primary symptoms of culture decay is that of depopulation. It is a sign literally that a Civilisation has become too lazy to look beyond the immediate. There is no longer any sense of duty to the past or the future, but only to a hedonistic present. Polybius (b. ca. 200 B.C.) observed this phenomenon of Hellenic Civilisation like Spengler did of ours, writing:

“In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. If, then, any one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard to this, what we were to do or say in order to become more numerous and better fill our cities,—would he not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was manifest and the cure in our own hands? For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak. On this subject there is no need to ask the gods how we are to be relieved from such a curse: for any one in the world will tell you that it is by the men themselves if possible changing their objects of ambition; or, if that cannot be done, by passing laws for the preservation of infants”.

Do Polybius’ thoughts sound like some unheeded doom-sayer speaking to us now about our modern world? If the reader can see the analogous features between Western Civilisation, and that of Greece and Rome then the organic course of Civilisations is being understood, and by looking at Greece and Rome we might see where we are heading.

Roman

Another often cited example of the fall of civilisation through miscegenation is that of Rome. However, despite the presence of slaves and traders of sundry races, like the Greeks, today’s Italians are substantially the same as they were in Roman times. Arab influence did not occur until Medieval times, centuries after the “fall of Rome”, with Arab rule extending over Sicily only during 1212-1226 A.D. The genetic male influence on Sicilians is estimated at only 6%. The predominant genetic influence is ancient Greek. The African Haplogroup L have a less than 1% frequency throughout Italy other than in Latium, Volterra, Basilicata and Sicily where there are frequencies of 2% to 3% . Sub-Saharan, that is, Negroid, mtDNA have been found at very low frequencies in Italy, albeit marginally higher than elsewhere in Europe, but date from 10,000 years ago. This study states: “….mitochondrial DNA studies show that Italy does not differ too much from other European populations”. Although there are small regional variations, “The mtDNA haplogroup make-up of Italy as observed in our samples fits well with expectations in a typical European population”.

Hence, an infusion of Negroid or Asian genes during the epoch of Rome’s decline and fall is lacking, and the reasons for that fall cannot be assigned to miscegenation. What slight frequency there is of non-Caucasian genetic markers entered Rome long before or long after the fall of Roman Civilisation. There was no “contamination of Roman blood”, but of Roman spirit and élan.

Alien immigration introduces cultural elements that dislocate the social and ethical basis of a Civilisation and aggravate an existing pathological condition. The English scholar Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, writing on the fall of Rome, commented that the Roman conquerors were subjected “to cultural inundation and grassroots influence”. Because Rome extended throughout the world, like the present Late Western, the economic opportunities accorded by Rome drew in all the elements of the subject peoples, “groups of mixed origin and alien ways of life”. “Even more significant was what the Romans learnt while on duty overseas, for men so influenced were of the highest rank”. Parkinson quotes Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, referring to the Roman colony of Antioch:

“…Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured, the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule, and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capitals of the East…”

Roman historian Livy wrote of the opulence of Asia being brought back to Rome by the soldiery:

“…it was through the army serving in Asia that the beginnings of foreign luxury were introduced into the City. These men brought into Rome for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestry, and other fabrics, and - what was at that time considered gorgeous furniture - pedestal tables and silver salvers. Banquets were made more attractive by the presence of girls who played on the harp and sang and danced, and by other forms of amusement, and the banquets themselves began to be prepared with greater care and expense. The cook whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial was rising in value, and what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art. Still what met the eye in those days was hardly the germ of the luxury that was coming”.

The moral decay of Rome resulted in the displacement of Roman stock, not by miscegenation, but by the falling birth-rate of the Romans. Such population decline is itself a major symptom of culture decay. The problem that it signifies is that a people has so little consciousness left as to its own purpose as a culture that its individuals do not have any responsibility beyond their own egos. Professor Tenney Frank, foremost scholar on the economic history of Rome, also considered the results of population decline, from the top of the social hierarchy downward:

“The race went under. The legislation of Augustus and his successors, while aiming at preserving the native stock, was of the myopic kind so usual in social lawmaking, and failing to reckon with the real nature of the problem involved. It utterly missed the mark. By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of Comelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patricate, and all but six disappear before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in 65 A. D. under Nero, all trace of a half is lost by Nerva’s day, a generation later. And the records are so full that these statistics may be assumed to represent with a fair degree of accuracy the disappearance of the male stock of the families in question. Of course members of the aristocracy were the chief sufferers from the tyranny of the first century, but this havoc was not all wrought by delatores and assassins. The voluntary choice of childlessness accounts largely for the unparalleled condition. This is as far as the records help in this problem, which, despite the silences is probably the most important phase of the whole question of the change of race. Be the causes what they may, the rapid decrease of the old aristocracy and the native stock was clearly concomitant with a twofold increase from below; by a more normal birth-rate of the poor, and the constant manumission of slaves

While allusions to “race” by Professor Frank are enough for “zoological materialists” to spin a whole theory about Rome’s decline and fall around miscegenation of the “white race” with blacks and Orientals, we now know from the genetics that despite the invasions over centuries, the Italians, like the Greeks, have retained their original racial composition to the present. What Frank is describing, by an examination of the records that show a disappearance of the leading patrician families, is that Rome was in a spiritual crisis, as all civilisations are when they regard child-bearing as a burden. Traditionalists such as Evola pointed out that the “secret of degeneration” of a civilisation is that it rots from the top downward, and as Spengler pointed out, one of the primary signs of that rot is childlessness. That there were Roman statesmen with the wisdom to understand what was happening is indicated by Augustus’ efforts to raise the birth-rate, but to no avail. Of this symptom of moral decay, Professor Frank wrote:

“In the first place there was a marked decline in the birthrate among the aristocratic families. … As society grew more pleasure-loving, as convention raised artificially the standard of living, the voluntary choice of celibacy and childlessness became a common feature among the upper classes. …”

Urbanisation, the magnetic pull of the megalopolis, the depopulation of the land and the proletarianism of the former peasant stock as in the case of the West’s Industrial Revolution, impacted in major ways on the fall of Rome. A. M. Duff wrote of the impact of rural depopulation and urbanisation:

“But what of the lower-class Romans of the old stock? They were practically untouched by revolution and tyranny, and the growth of luxury cannot have affected them to the same extent as it did the nobility. Yet even here the native stock declined. The decay of agriculture. … drove numbers of farmers into the towns, where, unwilling to engage in trade, they sank into unemployment and poverty, and where, in their endeavours to maintain a high standard of living, they were not able to support the cost of rearing children. Many of these free-born Latins were so poor that they often complained that the foreign slaves were much better off than they, and so they were. At the same time many were tempted to emigrate to the colonies across the sea which Julius Caesar and Augustus founded. Many went away to Romanize the provinces, while society was becoming Orientalized at home. Because slave labour had taken over almost all jobs, the free born could not compete with them. They had to sell their small farms or businesses and move to the cities. Here they were placed on the doles because of unemployment. They were, at first, encouraged to emigrate to the more prosperous areas of the empire to Gaul, North Africa and Spain. Hundreds of thousands left Italy and settled in the newly-acquired lands. Such a vast number left Italy leaving it to the Orientals that finally restrictions had to be passed to prevent the complete depopulation of the Latin stock, but as we have seen, the laws were never effectively put into force. The migrations increased and Italy was being left to another race. The free-born Italian, anxious for land to till and live upon, displayed the keenest colonization activity.”

The foreign cultures and religions that had come to Rome from across the empire changed the temperament of the Romans masses who were uprooted and migrating to the cities; where as in the nature of the cites, as Spengler showed, they became a cosmopolitan mass. Frank writes of this:

“This Orientalization of Rome’s populace has a more important bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those of the republic. There was a complete change in the temperament! There is today a healthy activity in the study of the economic factors that contributed to Rome’s decline. But what lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who had built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities. It would be wholly unfair to pass judgment upon the native qualities of the Orientals without a further study, or to accept the self-complacent slurs of the Romans, who, ignoring certain imaginative and artistic qualities, chose only to see in them unprincipled and servile egoists. We may even admit that had these new races had time to amalgamate and attain a political consciousness a more brilliant and versatile civilization might have come to birth.”

What is notable is not that the Romans miscegenated with Orientals, but that the uprooted, amorphous masses of the cities no longer adhered to the Traditions on which Roman civilisation was founded. The same process can be seen today at work in New York, London and Paris. Duff wrote of this, and we might consider the parallels with our own time:

“Instead of the hardy and patriotic Roman with his proud indifference to pecuniary gain, we find too often under the Empire an idle pleasure-loving cosmopolitan whose patriotism goes no further than applying for the dole and swelling the crowds in the amphitheatre”.

The Roman Traditional ethos of severity, austerity and disdain for softness that Emperor Julian attempted to reassert was greeted by “fashionable society” with “disgust”. Parkinson remarks that “there is just such a tendency in the London of today, as there was still earlier in Boston and New York”. These “world cities” no longer reflect a cultural nexus but an economic nexus, and hence one’s position is not based on how one or one’s family unfolds the Traditional ethos, but on whether or how one accumulates wealth.

Indian

India is the most commonly cited example of a civilisation that decayed through miscegenation, the invading Aryans imparting a High Culture on India and then forever falling into decay because of miscegenation with the low caste “blacks”, or Dravidians. However, Genetic research indicates that the higher castes have retained to the present a predominately Caucasian genetic inheritance.

“As one moves from lower to upper castes, the distance from Asians becomes progressively larger. The distance between Europeans and lower castes is larger than the distance between Europeans and upper castes, but the distance between Europeans and middle castes is smaller than the upper caste-European distance. … Among the upper castes the genetic distance between Brahmins and Europeans (0.10) is smaller than that between either the Kshatriya and Europeans (0.12) or the Vysya and Europeans (0.16). Assuming that contemporary Europeans reflect West Eurasian affinities, these data indicate that the amount of West Eurasian admixture with Indian populations may have been proportionate to caste rank.

“…As expected if the lower castes are more similar to Asians than to Europeans, and the upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, the frequencies of M and M3 haplotypes are inversely proportional to caste rank.

“…In contrast to the mtDNA distances, the Y-chromosome STR data do not demonstrate a closer affinity to Asians for each caste group. Upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, middle castes are equidistant from the two groups, and lower castes are most similar to Asians. The genetic distance between caste populations and Africans is progressively larger moving from lower to middle to upper caste groups.

“…Results suggest that Indian Y chromosomes, particularly upper caste Y chromosomes, are more similar to European than to Asian Y chromosomes.

“…Nevertheless, each separate upper caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians.”

Citing further studies, “…admixture with African or proto-Australoid populations” is “occasional”.

The chaos that afflicted India seems to have been of religio-cultural type rather than racial. Despite the superficiality of dusky hues, the Indian ruling castes have retained their Caucasian identity to the present. The genetic contribution of Australoids and Africans was minor.

Egyptian

Like India, Egypt is often cited as an example of a civilisation that was destroyed primarily by miscegenation, with Negroids. However, despite the myriad of invasions and population shifts, today’s Egyptians are still more closely related genetically to Eurasia than Africa. Migrations between Egypt, Nubia and Sudan have not been extensive enough to “homogenise the mtDNA gene pools of the Nile River Valley populations”, although Egyptians and Nubians are more closely related than Egyptians and southern Sudanese. However, significant differences remain. Even now, today’s Egyptians have primary genetic affinities with Asia, and North and Northeast Africa. The least affinity is to the populations of Sub-Sahara. The Haplotype M1, with a high frequency among Egyptians, hitherto thought to be of Sub-Saharan origin, is of Eurasian origin.

Miscegenation with Nubian “slaves” and mercenaries seems unlikely to have caused Egypt’s decay. While a Nubian or “black” pharaoh is alluded to by racial-zoologists as a sign of Egyptian decay, the Nubian civilisation had an intimate connection with the Egyptian and was itself impressive and of early origins.

Nubian civilisation, with palaces, temples and pyramids, flourished as far back as 7000 B.C. 223 pyramids, twice the number of Egypt, have been found along the Nile of the Nubian culture-region. The Nubian civilisation was of notably long duration surviving until the Muslim conquest of 1500 A.D. The Egyptians have viewed the Nubians either as a “conquered race or a superior enemy”. Hence, Egyptian depictions of shackled black slaves, give a widely inaccurate impression of the Nubian. Nubians became the pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th dynasty, providing stability where previously there had been ruin caused by civil wars between warlords, ca. 700 B.C. The Nubians were the custodians of Egyptian faith and culture at a time when Egypt was decaying. They regarded the restoration of the faith of Amun as their duty. It was the Nubian dynasties (760-656 B.C.), especially the rulership of Taharqa, which revived and purified Egyptian culture and religion. It was under the “white” rule of the Libyan pharaohs of the 21st dynasty (1069-1043 B. c.) that Egypt began a sharp decline. Ptolemaic (Greek) rule (332-30 B.C.) under Ptolemy IV (222 to 205 B.C.) brought to the rich and sumptuous pharaohs’ court “lax morals and vicious lifestyle” ending in “decadence and anarchy”. Byzantine rule (395 to 640 A.D.) through Christianisation wrought destruction on the Egyptian heritage, which was succeeded by Islamic rule. Of the long vicissitudes of Egypt’s rise and fall, it was the Nubian dynasty that had restored Egyptian cultural integrity. References to Nubians on the throne of the pharaohs tell no more of the causes of Egypt’s decay than if historians several millennia hence sought to ascribe the causes of the USA’s culture retardation to Obama’s presidency as a “black”.

We see in Egypt as in Rome, the Moorish civilisation, India and others, the causes of culture decay and fall as being something other than miscegenation. The contemporary Westerner should look for answers beyond this if only because he can see for himself that the West’s decay has no relationship to miscegenation. The number of Americans describing themselves as “mixed race” was just under 9 million in 2010. Of the 3,988,076 live births in the USA in 2014 368,213 were non-white. The USA did not become the global centre of culture-pestilence because of its mixed race population. What is more significant than the percentages of miscegenation, are the percentages of population decline caused by such factors as the limitation of children, and the rates of abortion. Twenty-one percent of all pregnancies in the USA are aborted. Such depopulation statics are an indication of culture pathology.

Of Egypt’s chaos contemporary sages observed, as they did of Rome and India, a disintegration of authority, traditional religion, and the founding ethos and mythos around which a healthy culture revolves. Egypt was often subjected to invasions and to natural disasters. These served as catalysts for culture degeneration. The papyrus called The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, state that after invasions and what seems to have been a class war, Egypt fell apart, there was family strife, the noble families were dispossessed by the lowest castes, authority was disrespected and overthrown, lawlessness and plunder were the norm, and the nobility was attacked: “A man looks upon his son as an enemy. A man smites his brother (the son of his mother)”. Craftsmanship has become degraded: “No craftsmen work, the enemies of the land have spoilt its crafts”. There is rebellion against the Uraeus or Re. “A few lawless men have ventured to despoil the land of the kingship”. It appears that the foundations of Traditional society, god, monarch, family and land, have been caste asunder. Further, “Asiatics” have seized the land from the ancestral occupiers, and have so insinuated themselves into the Egyptian culture that one can no longer tell who is Egyptian and who is alien: “There are no Egyptians anywhere”. “Women are lacking and no children are conceived”. Evidently there is a population crisis; that perennial symptom of decay. The political and administrative structure has collapsed, with “no officers in their place”. The laws are trampled on and cast aside. “Serfs become lords of serfs”. The writings of the scribes are destroyed.

What is being described is not a sudden upheaval, although the allusion to natural disasters and Asiatic invasion would imply this. The breakdown of regal authority, civil authority, depopulation, laws, family bonds, religious faith, agriculture and the social structure, imply an epoch of decline into chaos. The social structure has been inversed, as though a communistic revolution had occurred. “He who possessed no property is now a man of wealth. The prince praises him. The poor of the land have become rich, and the possessor of the land has become one who has nothing. Female slaves speak as they like to their mistresses. Orders become irksome. Those who could not build a boat now possesses ships. “The possessors of robes are now in rags”. “The children of princes are cast out in the street”.

With this inversion of hierarchy has come irreligion and the degradation of religion. The ignorant now perform their own rites to the Gods. Wrong offerings are made to the Gods. “Right is cast aside. Wrong is inside the council-chamber. The plans of the gods are violated, their ordinances are neglected… Reverence, an end is put to it”.

Ipuwer’s admonition was not only to rid Egypt of its enemies but to return to the Traditional ethos. This meant the reinstitution of proper religious rites, and the purification of the temples. “A fighter comes forth,” Ipuwer prophesises, to “destroy the wrongs”. “Is he sleeping? Behold, his might is not seen”. The Egyptians await an avatar, the personification of the Sun God Re (which Tradition states was the first of the Pharaohs) an Arthur who sleeps but will awaken, a redeemer that is a universal symbol from the Hindu Kalki, to Jesus in the vision of John of Patmos, the Katehon of Orthodox Russia, and many others across time and place.

Ipuwer avers to Egypt having gone through such epochs, alluding to his saying nothing other than what others have said before his time.

The Pharaoh is castigated for allowing Egypt to fall into chaos, with his authority being undermined, and without taking corrective actions. The Pharaoh as God-king, in terms of Tradition, had not maintained his authority as the nexus between the earthly kingdom and the Divine. The Pharaoh had caused “confusion throughout the land”. Certainty of the social hierarchy, crowned by the God-king, is the basis of Traditional societies. It seems that Egypt had entered into an epoch of what a Westerner could today identify in our time as that of scepticism and secularism. Chaos follows with the undermining of Cosmos.

Nefer-rohu warned Pharaoh of similar chaos. Likewise there would be “Asiatic” invasions, natural disasters, Re withdrawing his light, and again the inversion of hierarchy:

“The weak of arm is now the possessor of an arm. Men salute respectfully him whom formerly saluted. I show thee the undermost on top, turned about in proportion to the turning about of my belly. It is the paupers who eat the offering bread, while the servants jubilate. The Heliopolitan Nome, the birthplace of every god, will no longer be on earth”.

It is notable, again, that Nefer-rohu identifies the chaos with the breaking of the nexus with the divine, and the social order that has become “the undermost on top”. Also of interest is that Nefer-rohu refers to a redeemer, who has a Nubian mother, uniting Egypt and driving out the Asiatics, and the Libyans (the whitest of races of the region) and defeating the rebellious. Chaos resulted not from bio-genetic-race-factors but from a falling away of the regal and religious authority. If there is a race-factor it is in regard to Nubians being the custodians of Egyptian culture in periods of Egyptian decay, analogous to the revitalising “barbarians” who wept over the decaying Roman Empire.

Islamic

Islam had its Golden Age and rich civilisation, centred in Morocco, and extending into Spain. It is in ruins like civilisations centuries prior. The cultures that flourished in Morocco, both Islamic and pre-Islamic, were Berber. The Islamic civilisation they established with the founding of the Idrisid dynasty in 788 A. D. was ended by the invasion of the Fatimids from Tunisia ca. 900 A.D. Chaos ensued. Although there was a revival of High Culture during the 11th and 14th centuries, dynasties fell in the face of tribalism. The 16th century saw a revival initiated by al-Ghalin, several decades of wars of succession after his death in 1603, and continuing decline under Saadi dynastic rule during 1627 to 1659.

Caucasoid mtDNA sequences are at frequencies of 96% in Moroccan Berbers, 82% in Algerian Berbers and 78% in non-Berber Moroccans. The study of Esteban et al found that Moroccan Northern and Southern Berbers have only 3% to 1% Sub-Saharan mtDNA. Although difficult to define, since “Berber” is a Roman, not an indigenous term, the estimate for present day Morocco is 35% to 45% Berber, with the rest being Berber-Arab mixture. The primary point is that the Moroccan civilisation had ruling classes, whether pre-Islamic or Islamic, that remained predominantly Berber-Caucasian for most of its history, whether during its epochs of glory or of decline. Miscegenation does not account for the fall of the Moorish Civilisation.

The High Culture of Moorish Spain (Andalusia) was brought to ruin and decay not by miscegenation between “superior” Spaniards” and “inferior” Moors but by the overthrow of the Moorish ruling caste. Friedrich Nietzsche had observed this culture denegation with the fall of Moorish Spain (Andalusia). Stanley Lane-Poole wrote of the history of decay:

“The land, deprived of the skilful irrigation of the Moors, grew impoverished and neglected; the richest and most fertile valleys languished and were deserted; most of the populous cities which had filled every district of Andalusia fell into ruinous decay; and beggars, friars, and bandits took the place of scholars, merchants, and knights. So low fell Spain when she had driven away the Moors. Such is the melancholy contrast offered by her history”.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a well-travelled sage, grappled with the same problems confronting Islamic Civilisation as those Spengler confronted in regard to The West. A celebrated scholar, political adviser, and jurist, Ibn Khaldun’s domain of influence extended over the whole Islamic world. His major theoretical work is Muqaddimah (1377), intended as a preface to his universal history, Kitabal-Ibar, where he sought to establish basic principles of history by which historians could understand events. His theory is cyclic and morphological, based on “conditions within nations and races [which] change with the change of periods and the passage of time”. Like Evolahe was pessimistic as to what can be achieved by political action in the cycle of decline, writing that the “past resembles the future more than one drop of water another”.

Ibn Khaldun stated that history can be understood as a recurrence of similar patterns motivated by the drives of acquisition, group co-operation, and regal authority in the creation of a civilisation, followed by a cycle of decay. These primary drives become distorted and lead to the corrupting factors of luxury and domination, irresponsibility of authority and decline.

Like Spengler, in regard to the peasantry, Ibn Khaldun traces the beginning of culture to group or familial loyalty starting with the simple life of the rural - and desert – environments. The isolation and familial bonds lead to self-reliance, loyalty and leadership on the basis of mutual respect. Life is struggle, not luxury. According to Ibn Khaldun, when rulership becomes centralised and divorced from such kinship, free reign is given to luxury and ease. Political alliances are bought and intrigued rather than being based on the initial bonds and loyalties. Corruption pervades as the requirements of luxury increase. The decadence starts from the top, among the ruling class, and extends downward until the founding ethos of the culture is discarded, or exists in name only.

Ibn Khaldun begins from the organic character of the noble family in describing the analogous nature of cultural rise and fall, caused by a falling away of the original creative ethos with each successive generation:

“The builder of the family’s glory knows what it cost him to do the work, and he keeps the qualities that created his glory and made it last. The son who comes after him had personal contact with his father and thus learned those things from him. However, he is inferior to him in this respect, inasmuch as a person who learns things through study is inferior to a person who knows them from practical application. The third generation must be content with imitation and, in particular, with reliance upon tradition. This member is inferior to him of the second generation, inasmuch as a person who relies upon tradition is inferior to a person who exercises judgment.

“The fourth generation, then, is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. Its member has lost the qualities that preserved the edifice of its glory. He despises those qualities. He imagines that the edifice was not built through application and effort. He thinks that it was something due to his people from the very beginning by virtue of the mere fact of their descent, and not something that resulted from group effort and individual qualities. For he sees the great respect in which he is held by the people, but he does not know how that respect originated and what the reason for it was. He imagines it is due to his descent and nothing else. He keeps away from those in whose group feeling he shares, thinking that he is better than they”.

For Ibn Khaldun’s “generation” we might say with Spengler “cultural epoch”. Ibn Khaldun addresses the causes of this cultural etiolation, leading to the corrupting impact of materialism. Again, his analysis is remarkably similar to that of Spengler and the decay of the Classical civilisations:

“When a tribe has achieved a certain measure of superiority with the help of its group feeling, it gains control over a corresponding amount of wealth and comes to share prosperity and abundance with those who have been in possession of these things. It shares in them to the degree of its power and usefulness to the ruling dynasty. If the ruling dynasty is so strong that no-one thinks of depriving it of its power or of sharing with it, the tribe in question submits to its rule and is satisfied with whatever share in the dynasty’s wealth and tax revenue it is permitted to enjoy. ... Members of the tribe are merely concerned with prosperity, gain and a life of abundance. (They are satisfied) to lead an easy, restful life in the shadow of the ruling dynasty, and to adopt royal habits in building and dress, a matter they stress and in which they take more and more pride, the more luxuries and plenty they acquire, as well as all the other things that go with luxury and plenty.

“As a result the toughness of desert life is lost. Group feeling and courage weaken. Members of the tribe revel in the well-being that God has given them. Their children and offspring grow up too proud to look after themselves or to attend to their own needs. They have disdain also for all the other things that are necessary in connection with group feeling.... Their group feeling and courage decrease in the next generations. Eventually group feeling is altogether destroyed. ... It will be swallowed up by other nations.

Ibn Khaldun refers to the “tribe” and “group feeling” where Spengler refers to nations, peoples, and races. The dominant culture becomes corrupted through its own success and its culture become static; its inward strength diminishes in proportion to its outward glamour. Hence, the Golden Age of Islam is over, as are those of Rome and Athens. New York, Paris, and London are in the analogous cultural epochs to those of Fez, Rome and Athens. The “world city” becomes the focus of a world civilisation that ends as cosmopolitan and far removed from its founding roots. Our present “world-cities’” – in particular, New York and The City of London - are the control centres of world politics, economics, and mass-culture by the fact of their also being the centres of banking. These world-cities are the prototypes for a world civilisation that continues to be called “Western”, under the leadership of the USA, a rotting centre like Fez and Rome.

The Muslim determination of what is “progress” and what is “decline” has a spiritual foundation:

“The progressiveness or backwardness of society at any given point of time is determinable in relative terms. It can be compared to other contemporary societies [like the Spenglerian method] or to its own state in the past. … for Muslim society although economic progress is not frowned upon, it is placed lower on the order of priorities as compared to other factors; e.g. the acquisition of knowledge or the provision of justice. There is also a tradition (Hadis) of the Holy Prophet that lists the symptoms of society that is in a pathological state of decline. These outward symptoms point to an underlying malaise in the society but can also provide a useful starting point for corrective actions for stopping or reversing the onset of decline”. The high and low points of Muslim civilisation can be identified as those of a “Golden Age” or of an “Abyss”.

Comparable to the warnings of other sages, in an epoch of decline again there is an inversion of hierarchy, or more specifically here, of character, the Hadith stating that those in such a society would be corrupted, while others might resist within themselves:

“There will be soon a period of turmoil in which the one who sits will be better than one who stands and the one who stands will be better than one who walks and the one who walks will be better than one who runs. He who would watch them will be drawn by them. So he who finds a refuge or shelter against it should make it as his resort”.

Hebrew “Race”

A Traditionalist “race”, conscious of its nexus with the Divine as the basis of culture, endures regardless of contact with foreigners because of its inward strength. This allows it to accept foreigners not only without weakening the cultural organism but even strengthening it; because it accepts foreign input on its own terms. A Traditionalist “race” surviving over the course of millennia without succumbing to the cyclical laws of decay is the Jewish. They are the Traditionalist “race” par excellence. No better example can be had than this People that has maintained its nexus with its Divinity as the basis of cultural survival, whose religion is a race-founding and race-sustaining mythos.

Contrary to the beliefs of certain racial ideologues, including extreme Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, this survival is not the result of bans on miscegenation. The Jewish law as embodied in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is based not on zoological race but on a race mythos. The Mosaic Law demands “race purity” in the Traditionalist sense; that of a community of belief in a heritage and a destiny.

Bizarrely, some white racists have adopted the Torah commandments as being based on genetic purity, in their belief that whites are the true Israelites. For example the priest Phineas, at the time of Moses is held in esteem by such white supremacists because he speared an Israelite and a Midianite in the act of copulation. At this time apparently the Midianites were seducing Israel away from its God, towards Baal. A purge of Israel took place. However the chapter in its entirety makes plain this was a matter of religion, not miscegenation. The nexus between Israel and the Divine was being broken by the influence of “the daughters of Moab.” Israel’s Divinity is recorded as having threatened wrath because of “my insistence on exclusive devotion.” The Divine nexus was established for eternity with the line of Phineas because he had “not tolerated any rivalry towards his god”. Moses himself had married the daughter of a Midianite priest, so the issue with the Midianites was clearly religious, and specifically that such foreign influences would break Israel’s nexus with the Divine that renders them a “special people”. Where marriages with Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, et al are prohibited it is because this nexus would be subverted. However, in the same book Deuteronomy, where the Israelite war code is being established, when a city has been defeated the adult males are to be eliminated, and the women and children are to be taken to be grafted on to Israel. The commandments for this type of “scorched earth policy” were based on preventing foreigners from teaching Israel their religions. There are precise laws as to marrying a non-Israelitish captive woman, who after a month of mourning for the deaths of her family, will have the marriage consummated and thereby become part of Israel.

Jeremiah (ca. 600 B.C.), son of the high priest Hilkiah, was one of the most significant voices against culture-decay, analogous to Ipuwer the Egyptian sage, Titus Livius, and Cato the Censor, in Rome, and our own Spengler and Evola. He warned that Israel would prosper while the nexus with Tradition and ipso facto with the Divine was maintained; Israel would fall physically if it fell away morally from that Tradition. Jeremiah saw the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the carrying into Babylonian captivity of Judah. As with the other Civilisations that have fallen, the first symptom had been a subversion of its founding religion. Interestingly, religious decay would be quickly proceeded by an invasion of foreigners, reminiscent of Ipuwer’s warning of Egypt’s invasion by “Asiatics”. Hence, Jeremiah warns that invasion is imminent as a punishment for Israel’s departure from the Traditional faith: “I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshiping what their hands have made”. From their self-styled role as a Holy People, they had fallen from the oath of their forefathers, Jeremiah/YHWH admonishing: “The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD?’ Those who deal with the law did not know me; the leaders rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols. ‘Therefore I bring charges against you again,’ declares the LORD. ‘And I will bring charges against your children’s children’”. Jeremiah states that the priesthood has become corrupted, from whence the rot proceeds downward. “The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end?” Specifically, all of Israel had become motivated by greed. The admonition was to stand at the “crossroads” as to what paths to follow, and choose “the ancient paths”.

“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the LORD. This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it’”.

Greed, or what we now call materialism, has been the common factor of the fall of Civilisations, referred to by sages and philosophers up to our own Spengler, Brooks Adams, and Evola. The other common factor, as we have seen, has been the corruption of religion and the priestly caste, the priests and the prophets being condemned by Jeremiah.

The perennial survival of the Israelites is based on their adherence to Tradition. Prophets such as Jeremiah are the Jews’ constant warning to stay true to their “ancient paths” or destruction will result. The Jews worldwide have had, when not a King over Israel, the focus of a coming King-Messiah, Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Temple of Solomon (including the plans to rebuild the Temple as another focus for the future) as their world axial points, and the Mosaic Law as a universal code of living across time and place.These axial points have formed and maintained the Jews as a metaphysical race. Whatever others might think of some of their laws and beliefs their maintenance of a Traditional nexus has allowed them to supersede the cyclic laws of decay perhaps like no other people, to overcome decline and be restored, while paradoxically being the carriers of cultural pathogens among other civilisations (Marxism, Freudianism).

What the genetics of races shows, past and present, is that miscegenation has not been a cause for the collapse of civilisations. Perhaps dysgenics might cause such a collapse, but hitherto there seems scant evidence for it. By focusing to the point of ideological obsession and dogma on the assume causes of culture-death being that of miscegenation, the actual causes are overlooked. Perhaps civilisation, theoretically, might die through dysgenics, whether racial or otherwise, but it seems that before such a dysgenic process has ever taken place the morphological laws of organic life and death have intervened as witnessed by those such as Livy, Cato, Ibn Khaldun, and in our time Spengler, Evola and Brooks Adams.

Julius Evola - Tom Sunic & E. Christian Kopff

- How Tradition get passed down through the generations- The mind of Julius Evola and what he meant by “revolting against the modern world.”- Evola’s thoughts on the “masses.”- Evola’s thoughts on Western Tradition- Evola’s thoughts on masculinity- Evola’s relevance for Americans and the rest of the modern West- Evola’s criticism of Communism and its comparison to Capitalism- The spiritual life vs. racial science; the State vs. the People- Ezra Pound- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

mardi, 26 avril 2016

When Men and Mountains Meet: Spiritual Ascent in the Age of Commodification

“Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet / This is not Done by Jostling in the Street,” wrote William Blake.

The modern world suffocates the soul of humankind. Matter longs for the embrace of soul, just as the unborn is ensheathed in the mother’s womb; and the soul desires the caress of matter, just as a newborn is cradled in the mother’s arms. Every moment is the nondual experience of gestation and birth of soul into matter, matter into soul. Modern life severs this connection as carelessly as the assembly line obstetrician prematurely severs the umbilical cord that still carries vital nutrients from mother to child. We are weighed upon scales imbalanced by ceaseless activity and insidious apathy, our hearts faint with anxiety and our bodies dead with the weight of indifference.

How do we reconnect with the primordial source in a decentered and displaced world?

The spiritual quest of the higher person is the path that leads one on a journey to reunite with divine nature, and there are few greater paths to accelerate this reunification than the experience of the mountains. Amongst the peaks one transforms from a rank-and-file soldier of modernity into a Grail Knight—a golden embryo shining in the dark cosmic womb of creation.

In Meditations on the Peaks, Julius Evola wrote:

In the struggle against mountain heights, action is finally free from all machines, and from everything that detracts from man’s direct and absolute relationship with things. Up close to the sky and to crevasses—among the still and silent greatness of the peaks; in the impetuous raging winds and snowstorms; among the dazzling brightness of glaciers; or among the fierce, hopeless verticality of rock faces—it is possible to reawaken (through what may at first appear to be the mere employment of the body) the symbol of overcoming, a truly spiritual and virile light, and make contact with primordial forces locked within the body’s limbs. In this way the climber’s struggle will be more than physical and the successful climb may come to represent the achievement of something that is no longer merely human. In ancient mythologies the mountain mountain peaks were regarded as the seats of the gods; this is myth, but it is also the allegorical expression of a real belief that may always come alive again sub specie interioritatis.

Meditations on the Peaks (English translation available from Inner Traditions) is a collection of Evola’s writings on the spiritual quest of mountain climbing. While not free of the commodification of the modern sporting life (one only need to look at the resort towns inviting crass hordes of weekend warriors that contaminate the regions for a reminder), the mountains offer potential for the spiritual conquest of self-overcoming. By training the body, purifying the soul and cultivating a reverence for mortality, one may, with iron will and monumental discipline, ascend the peaks in contemplation of their silent, still and divine majesty.

Evola presents mountain climbing as a Yoga of the scholar and the athlete. The modern world has divided the intellectual and athletic pursuits, creating a false dichotomy of “nerds” and “jocks” that predominates the industrialized West. Either the body atrophies for feint intellectual praise and bourgeois academic prestige, or the mind suffers for the pursuit of empty competition and physical achievement. In this dichotomous framing of brains against brawn, both scholar and athlete lose touch with the metaphysical reality that study and training develops. It is among the peaks where this division is erased. Evola wrote:

[A]mong sports, mountain climbing is certainly the one that offers the most accessible opportunity for achieving this union of body and spirit. Truly, the enormity, the silence, and the majesty of the great mountains naturally incline the soul toward that which is greater than human, and thus attract the better people to the point at which the physical aspect of climbing (with all the courage, the self-mastery and the mental lucidity that it requires) and an inner spiritual realization, become the inseparable and complementary parts of one and the same thing.

At the heart of Evola’s study of the peaks is the eleventh century Tibetan Buddhist sage Milarepa. Credited with the revival of metaphysical doctrine within the Mahayana school of Buddhism, Milarepa’s teachings were known in the form of songs describing episodes of his life that remained within the current of oral tradition until modern times.

One day, Milarepa journeyed into the mountains for ascetic retreat. When six months had passed without seeing their teacher, Milarepa’s disciples had assumed that he had fallen victim to a brutal snowstorm, caught without food against the unforgiving elements. In their mourning, his disciples made sacrificial offerings prescribed for the dead. When spring arrived, they went to search for him. During their journey, they were astonished when they saw a snow leopard that transformed into a tiger. As they entered the Cave of the Demons, they heard a singing voice that they immediately recognized as their teacher’s. It was Milarepa who had projected the images of the leopard and the tiger, having sensed his disciples approaching. He told his disciples that although he went a long time without food he did not hunger, for he gained sustenance from the offerings they made for him.

Upon returning home, Milarepa explained how he was able to “endure the elements, the icy temperatures, and raging wind, thus overcoming the invisible forces (the ‘demons’) disguised as snow,” thusly singing:

The snowfall was beyond all measure. Snow covered the Whole mountain and even touched the sky, falling through the bushes and weighing down the trees.

In this great disaster I remained in utter solitude. The snow, the wintry blast, and my thin cotton garment fought against each other on the white mountain. The snow, as it fell on me, turned into drizzle. I conquered the raging winds, subduing them to silent rest.

The cotton cloth I wore was like a burning brand. The struggle was of life and death, as when giants wrestle and sabers clash.

I, the competent yogi, was victorious; my power over the vital heat (tumo) and the two channels was thus shown. By observing the Four Ills caused by meditation and keeping to the inner practice, the cold and warm pranas became the essence. This was why the raging wind grew tame and the storm, subdued, lost its power.

Not even the devas’ army could compete with me. This battle, I, the yogi, won.

These are the harsh conditions one must endure on the merciless path of higher spirituality. Abandoning the world in cosmic isolation, the seeker must withstand the chaotic conditions of an unrestrained cosmos through the power of their own inner flame. It is during times of great peril, whether alone atop a physical mountain or abandoned to the darkest predilections of life, when we must light the fire of our crucible and burn away within. One might be left for dead, but will gain sustenance from the offerings of mourners as the unborn child receives nutrients from the mother. For it is in these most rugged and unforgiving of conditions that we return to the cosmic womb of creation, where all dross and detritus burns away and we emerge purified and renewed.

To this day, Evola remains a controversial figure in metaphysical circles. Mention of his name is enough to incite neo-McCarthyist accusations of fascist tendencies or a mistaken sympathy amongst white national racialists. Owing perhaps to the ever widening gulf between spirit and body, it is near impossible nowadays to balance an admiration for a great scholar’s superlative body of work with a reservation of their difficult political views without finding oneself in the snake pit of guilt by association. As the body is further estranged from the spirit, both will descend into a pit of decadent self-pleasure, and find anathema anything which challenges one to greater heights. Evola’s ideas are dangerous. But, like the mountains, so too is the spiritual quest. As the great mountaineer Reinhold Messner said, “The mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.”

Messner is one of the best exemplars of the discipline cultivated on the path of higher spirituality. He is the first individual on record, along with Peter Habeler, to ascend Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. Messner is also the first climber to ascend all fourteen of the eight-thousanders, mountains located in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges with peaks exceeding 8,000 meters (26,247 ft) above sea level. These are peaks that are well above the “death zone,” altitudes where the amount of oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life. Messner’s records are not the same as the medals won by competing athletes; they are physically intangible totems, cairns left on the path toward mastery. Eschewing the commodification of the modern world, Messner is the paragon of peak physical, mental and spiritual development.

The mountains remain a testament of spiritual initiation in the modern era. Populations will grow and disappear, cultures will spread and vanish, and civilizations will rise and fall, but the mountains will keep still for centuries. The timeless stability of the mountains is what has attracted spiritual seekers to them since the dawn of human culture. In this still and silent wilderness, where the body of man is at the mercy of both nature and the gods, we find the foundation to build the inner sanctum. When in the mountains, an ascetic like Julius Evola or a libertine like Aleister Crowley both find the sanctuary they seek. At these altitudes, it matters not what your opinions are or who they offend, but how well you have conditioned the body and trained the mind.